As the Beltway Sniper holds literally all of Maryland hostage, gun control lobbyists, led by New York Senator Charles Schumer and Maryland Governor Parris Glendening, have found an excellent opportunity to politicize the nine sniper killings by demanding that Congress institute a nationwide gun fingerprinting database.
On the outside this sounds like a good idea. A gun fingerprint is essentially the burn marks and scratches of a particular bullet casing, which is ejected after the gun is fired. Each gun leaves a unique set of markings on each casing and can act as an effective fingerprint for police officers.
With a nationwide system in place, a shooting in Boston could be traced to a gun purchased in California. The system would also give the owner’s name and address and the gun’s make, model and serial number.
However, in reality, the system has many fatal flaws, as shown by the system’s lackluster trial runs. Ironically, the state of Maryland already instituted this Constitutionally questionable scheme in 2000 and has so far amassed a database of 17,000 casings. How many court cases have used evidence from the fingerprinting database? Two. How many court cases involving this evidence have led to a conviction? None.
So two years and more than a million tax dollars later, the Maryland gun fingerprint registry has been almost completely useless, emphasizing that there is no guarantee that taking this program to a nationwide level will solve anything.
The reason this system can never work correctly is because this gun ‘fingerprint’ the gun control lobby is so confident in is not permanent gun fingerprints change over time. When a hot metal slug is fired out of the gun, you have metal scraping metal, and over prolonged periods of use the metal will wear down, changing the fingerprint.
Should a person ever want to quickly ‘change’ their gun fingerprint, they could simply scrape the inside of a gun’s barrel with a screwdriver to bring about the desired effect. A person knowledgeable in the use of firearms, as the Maryland sniper appears to be, could easily change a gun fingerprint without even hampering the weapon’s accuracy.
Then of course, there is the easiest and simplest way to avoid detection: picking up the ejected casings after they have been used, giving the police almost nothing to work with.
Along with being defective on the technical level, the system is also fundamentally flawed, as the database will never truly be as comprehensive as it needs to be. Stolen guns, modified guns and the hundreds of millions of guns manufactured in this country before this system is instituted will not be recognizable. So unless the United States government expects every criminal to mail their shell casings to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I see no way the fingerprint database ever will be really effective.
In the face of so many glaring inefficiencies, this system is practically useless, especially when considering the massive expense instituting it would entail. Yet gun control groups and Democrats everywhere are heralding this as the newest weapon in law enforcement and a necessity now that we live in the age of the Beltway Sniper.
Forget the fact that even if this system were in place today, and had been recording gun fingerprints for the last 30 years, it is doubtful we’d be any closer to catching the sniper who has started all this controversy. To the Democrats, the optimal decision is to spend a fortune and violate the rights of this nation’s gun owners so the people can have an illusion of safety.
But all practical inefficiencies aside, the gun fingerprint database is fundamentally dangerous because it is just that a database which will contain the name of every single gun buyer in the country. A nationwide gun owner’s database is a risky concept because it could be the first step in a nationwide gun confiscation program, should one ever be enacted.
In a time when liberals everywhere are bashing the government for secretly taking away our civil liberties in the wake of Sept. 11, liberals themselves are being brazenly hypocritical by these flagrant attempts to limiting our Second Amendment rights.
By waving the nine bloody shirts the sniper has left behind, Democrats are promoting open discrimination against gun owners and violating some less popular civil rights by demanding that U.S. citizens be registered in a secret police database for simply exercising their right to bear arms.
Over the past year, I have often heard this Ben Franklin quote: ‘They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’
Many people use this quote to comment on President Bush’s USA Patriot Act. But I feel it fits well in this situation as well. The gun fingerprinting system will not even give us temporary safety, but rather the illusion of safety. Its cost will be a threat to a Constitutional amendment and the privacy rights of gun owners everywhere.
However, the American Civil Liberties Union, the bastion of social action that defends various other civil liberty causes, hasn’t issued a peep over the proposed gun measures. In fact, its website doesn’t even mention gun rights at all. While they are quick to jump all over the Republican president and the conservative attorney general, the ACLU is surprisingly mute when it comes to freedoms the liberals aren’t so hot about.
The liberals need to understand that defending our individual freedoms goes both ways, to the left and to the right, because it’s not just liberal causes that are on the line in the year 2002.