The Microstamping Scam

Mike McDaniel today at the American Thinker has an article entitled The microstamping scam. If you have been keeping up with the gun news, you have periodically heard of microstamping. The idea of microstamping is that each gun used at a crime scene leaves a tiny identifying mark on the casing of every bullet fired. On paper it probably sounds like a good idea to an anti-gunner. But there are practical problems as well as legal ones.

Among the never-ending attempts of anti-liberty/gun cracktivists to deprive Americans of their unalienable Second Amendment rights are various microstamping schemes. Microstamping requires leaving a unique imprint on the primer of a cartridge case. The only potentially workable means of doing this is laser engraving the tip of a firing pin with very small letters/numbers. Some microstamping schemes demand a second unique imprint, but on the expended case as well as the primer.

What, you might ask, is the point? Is microstamping a valid crime fighting tool? No. The point is making firearms more expensive, and harassing law-abiding gun owners in any way possible. In my law enforcement career, I never solved a case through fingerprints, nor was I aware of anyone that did. Trying to solve a crime with a microstamped primer would be even less productive.

The practical problems:

The second imprint method has never been proved even remotely viable, so we’ll stick to the firing pin method. Primers are not uniformly hard, even those from a single manufacturer, so imprints are iffy. A dirty gun might make no imprint. It would take only a few minutes with an abrasive to remove the laser engraving, and microstamping schemes apply only to semiautomatic handguns, which eject expended cases as part of the firing cycle. Revolvers do not.

The legal and Constitutional issue:

Any microstamping scheme is of necessity a gun registration scheme, because without a massive national database containing an image of a microstamped case from every gun in America, there’s no way to identify from which gun that case came. For now, it’s against federal law for government to maintain a gun registry, which doesn’t mean government isn’t trying to do it under the radar. Even so, the only case images they’d have on file are from semiautomatic handguns manufactured after a federal microstamping law went into effect. Hundreds of millions of handguns would be unaffected and essentially untraceable.

Even if a criminal doesn’t file the engraving off a firing pin, all they have to do is replace the firing pin, use a revolver, or stop a few seconds to collect their expended cases. Even better, they can visit a range, collect a variety of cases, and spread them around their crime scenes, sending hapless police on wild goose chases.

I have never thought that microstamping schemes could work. Given millions of guns are bought every year, each with its own unique number scheme. Stamping that on a small pistol primer that is one fifth of an inch in diameter. Of course, dirt could foul the microstamping. Excessive wear of the firing pin leave incomplete markings. The firing pin could be filed down, or it could be replaced. I suspect that many anti-gunners actually believe that microstamping is a viable way to catch criminals. But the people making such laws know better. They just want to make guns more expensive, harass gun owners, and possibly create a backdoor registration scheme.