California: Micro-stamping issues snag handgun law
Two years after California passed a novel law requiring the next generation of semiautomatic handguns to leave a microscopic identifying code on shell casings, the controversial technology appears no closer to being introduced here or anywhere else. California Attorney General Jerry Brown has not certified the law, which is required before it can take effect as scheduled on Jan. 1, and his aides could not say when that may happen
I suppose if the Breathalyzer ignition lock only worked some of the time, the folks at MADD would be insisting that it be implemented at once on the cars of any convicted drunk driver anyway. If these California lackwits insist on implementing an unproven technology that the FBI and its own inventor say does not work at 100% all of the time (the FBI was more critical of microstamping than that), it's going to come back and bite them the first time some prosecutor tries to use microstamped evidence in a criminal case and the defense shreds its validity by citing the FBI's reports on microstamping's unreliability and the jury accepts the defense's premise.
Microstamping is sometimes called "ballistic fingerprinting" by the anti-gunners. The problem is, it's not fingerprints. You can beat the microstamping by changing out the firing pin and presumably by replacing some other part or taking a file to it. Fingerprints are constant and unchanging, and to date no one has ever found a case of duplicated fingerprints, even among twins and other multiple births where the DNA is identical to the point you can transplant body parts without immunosuppressive drugs. The thought does occur to me that microstamping is a dead end, a solution looking for a problem.
