Without doubt criminal investigative forensic tools solve many crimes in this country. However, we all know that there are way too many variables and extenuating factorials that can mar POSITIVE ballistic fingerprinting. This uncertainty could quite possibly set sights on you and your gun collection.

So now I'm thinking more and more on proactively resisting the [b]Ballistic Finger Printing[/b] push by the antis; whose true goal is repealing our Second Amendment rights.

On another thread I tongue in cheek suggested marketing a simple tool that would alter the signature of your rifling without compromise to accuracy. This feat could be accomplished far easier than perfecting ballistic fingerprinting to an exacting science.

So why not? Why not modify our barrels' rifling? We do it legally by shooting thousands of rounds through our guns. We do it when we remove and replace barrels when worn. We do it by precision crowning the muzzle for accuracy.

This theoretic tool would simply score, or cut, a new print on a portion of the exiting end of a barrel. If we all did it the database would become useless and null. There cannot be any legal precedence against it. The tool would have no moving parts and one could be sold for every caliber made.

If this intent was presented to lawmakers, legal think tanks, and law enforcement it may be enough to put an end to the pure bullshit they are making innuendo about.

I solicit your insight and comments because I'm going forward with this.

If it dosen't work as advertised, what else is it but another name for gun registration?

The whole idea of a ballistic finger print database is just a prelude to registering firing pins, bolts and barrels.  Those are the obvious ones, but I'm sure that registering every individual gun part would be proposed.  How much would a $7 firing pin cost once it had to have all the paperwork that a lower receiver gets?  Anyway, since barrel wear is a factor, I'm sure it wouldn't be long before everyone had to be licensed to purchase ammo and submit information about the gun they intend to use it in.  That way, if they get a 95% match to one of your guns , they could substantiate your claims that you've fired thousands and thousands of rounds since it was "fingerprinted".

If they had a database with hundreds of millions of guns, I think it would become much more likely to end up with a lot of false "certain" matches.  Right now, if they have a recovered bullet or shell casing, a suspect, and a weapon, they can link the bullet or shell casing to the weapon and if they can link the weapon to the person, through paperwork or fingerprints, they have a case.  However, with this "ballistic fingerprinting" it would be like going after someone because they have the same make of car and the same brand of tires that left tracks at the scene of the crime.  When the sample size is small, the probability for error is small.  As the sample size increases, the probability for error grows also.  The database just makes it a lot easier to generate a suspect list without doing any actual investigation.  Instead of being a suspect because someone saw you there at the time of the crime, you could become one just because someone in a lab said your gun's "fingerprint" was a 99% match with the one used in a crime.  

They would likely come after you for making a tool "designed to help criminals commit crimes."  Precedence doesn't matter in these cases.  Look at the cities who tried suing gun manufacturers for making a legal product that works as intended.  

You think it will only be used to solve crimes?  The topic of "ballistic fingerprinting" has come-up several times at work, and many of my coworkers would like to see it be used to create crimes.  For example, finding pairs that match and investigating them, because it could be the same rifle that was either stolen or had a sample taken from it twice to use as a substitute for the the fingerprint of the other one.  I tried to explain the birthday paradox, and it fell on deaf ears.  If you can uniquely identify (as one number I heard a software company mention) 15,000 different "fingerprints," and you have 200,000,000 (estimate of the number of guns in the country) firearms, on average there will be over 13,000 rifles with each fingerprint.  You can use the "fingerprint," for example, to say that the rifle that you found at a crime scene matched the bullet, and the odds of that happening are only 1 out of 15,000 so you strongly believe that it was the weapon used, but you can not go the other way.  Legislators really need to be taught a basic statistics.z

"Ballistic Fingerprinting" is about as scientific as "lie detector" tests or reading coffee grounds [1].

[1] this is America! We don't read in stinking tea leaves

Simpletons will be misled. Anyone with a clue about this "technology" realizes it is nothing but a sales job, devoid of any real value.

Um, runaway acceleration in Audis,

Alar,

Silicone breast implants.

Junk science costs a lot.

Never happened, bull, just a bunch of dumbass soccer moms too dumb to count to 2. And that was when, early 70s?

Even if ballistic fingerprinting worked it would only let law enforcement trace the bullet back to the (lawful) owner of the rifle that fired it.

Since when do criminals make lawful purchases?

or

Once the database is in full swing then they will argue it doesn't work if citizens sell their rifles w/o paperwork, so the next step would be to require paperwork, with another ballistic fingerprint upon a private sale.....I think you can see where all of this is really going.

Why not record everything you say just incase it is needed to solve a crime?

[red]Damn them.  Lousy rotten bastards.[/red]

Change the bolt too. The extractor and ejector leave a print too.

How the hell are they going to find matches reliably among millions of guns, if they can't take a few bullets, possible fired from the same gun, and prove that they are indeed the same gun?

I'm speaking of their failure to link the bullets in MD/VA together......

If I can't shoot my ar into a target 10 times in a row, and they can't tell me that all 10 bullets came from the same rifle, or even that some of them did, I propose that their system isn't worth a crap.  What a waste of money!

I still say it's just a front for mandatory registration.