Caleb at the Call Me Ahab blog has dissected the Forensic Science Graduate Group at UC Davis’ report
What Caleb discovered is what he and and any other gunnie worth his salt already knew:
That firing pin serialization is expensive, easily made unreadable and will in no way stop criminals from using firearms to commit crimes.
This is an actual peer-reviewed document, not some press release piece thrown out there. While they did find that some types of laser engraving can transfer to cartridges, no single method transferred 100% of the encoded information to 100% of the cases 100% of the time. Most hovered around the 60% range of data transfered, and several methods had much lower averages than that. Couple that with the fact that all the encoding methods can be easily obfuscated in 6 minutes and 30 seconds (or less), it’s no wonder that the researcher’s final report says that there is no mandate for this technology.
The study shows that the people promoting this technology are either inventors/investors trying to make a buck, or gun bigots hoping to further restrict access to law abiding citizens firstly through drastic increases in the initial cost of purchase and secondly through restrict what firearms can be purchased.
Both of these groups of people are telling blatant falsehoods to get this product stuffed into the market. The biggest one being that criminals are too stupid to disassemble the guns to remove the firing pins and ruin the laser etched serial numbers. Anyone who has sen the forensic photos of the internals of the rifles used in the North Hollywood bank robbery knows that to be a lie.
Now we can only hope that this report doesn’t get “lost†before the California State Legislature attempts to ignore it.