Response from a reader: Senators Red and Kohl are way off base. If they truly wanted to curb violent crime, they would demand enforcement of current laws and incarceration of convicted violent felons. Any money wasted on an ineffective hoax such as firearm "fingerprinting" is better spent punishing violent predators. As a "less than expert" firearms owner, I could easily modify any firearm to defeat the technology these Senators are pushing. We all want less violent crime and it is time for the ignorant to listen to the firearms experts. -- Tuesday, December 23, 2003 at 10:16:09

Position of the Senators: U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) joined with Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) to introduce a bill today that would create a national high-tech ballistics database of bullets and cartridge casings which would enable law enforcement to connect bullets and casings used in violent crimes with a firearm and its owner.

As a bullet travels through the barrel of a gun, grooves inside the barrel and other characteristics of the weapon, create unique imprints on the bullet -- a fingerprint. Bullet casings also can have distinctive markings created by the gun's firing pin, ejector and the breech mechanism.

The Kohl-Reed legislation would require that the digital images of the bullet or casing from every new firearm manufactured in the U.S. or imported into the country be stored in a computer database. That data can then be kept with the serial numbers of the guns, so that guns used in a crime can be traced to the owners.

Reed stated, "No ballistics data is available for most of the estimated 200 million guns in this country, and no ballistics fingerprint information is being collected on the three to five million new guns coming into commerce in the United States each year. As a result, law enforcement usually has no way to trace the evidence back to a specific firearm and, ultimately, a suspect."

The bill does not require the submission to law enforcement of any information beyond the ballistics images produced by test firing the gun. The names of any people or businesses that buy guns from federally licensed manufacturers or importers will continue to be kept in the files of those manufacturers and importers just as the law requires today. Law enforcement would only have access to this information in the context of a criminal investigation, for example when the evidence from a crime scene matches a ballistics fingerprint record for a gun produced and sold by a certain manufacturer or importer.

The database would allow investigators to link crimes with firearms and owners by comparing bullets and cartridge casings found at one crime scene with those found at another.

Only two states -- New York and Maryland -- currently have such a system for matching guns with the bullets they fire. They were created by laws that require gun dealers to test firearms before a sale, and to provide electronic markings from the bullets and shell casings to a central database.

Efforts to implement a national system have been blocked by the gun lobby. Groups like the National Rifle Association have argued that collection of ballistic information is a preliminary step toward national gun registration.

The advocates of this bill say that a national ballistics database might help law enforcement agencies match the shell casings and bullets from the recent sniper shootings in the Washington, DC area with the owner of the sniper's weapon.