Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Public Benefits Trump Private Rights

At least California's Attorney General is not hiding his totalitarian instincts:

"The weighing of public benefits versus private rights tilts heavily in favor of the public benefits," he said.

He's speaking about a bill to force ammunition makers to put unique identifiers or serial numbers on each and every bullet sold in the state of California. Let me just bullet point (hem) the problems:

He likens it to bills that established DNA laboratories:

Lockyer likened the proposal to previous legislation that advanced law enforcement investigation efforts, such as funding for DNA labs.

Except that funding DNA laboratories probably didn't issue unfunded mandates to private companies and, ultimately, consumers. But don't worry, there's government pork, too, since the state would need a new technological money pit into which it can throw good money after bad.
The bill will help solve crimes, but will not prevent crimes:
"We're going to solve (more) crimes if this bill becomes law," Attorney General Bill Lockyer testified.
You see, citizen, this will not prevent crime, but it will increase the case clearance rate after crimes are committed. If someone wants to shoot you dead and doesn't care or doesn't reason it out, those bullets with little numbers on them will kill you just as dead.
Limited practical benefit:
The proposal would provide investigators with a huge leap forward in their efforts to trace ammunition at a crime scene to the person who fired it. Though ballistics testing enables police to connect a bullet to the gun that fired it, its use in investigations is limited because investigators need to recover both the gun and the bullet to confirm a match.

While bullets used in a crime may have been lost or stolen from their original purchaser, knowing who that person is will provide a starting point for investigators that they previously have not had, supporters say. Randy Rossi, the director of the firearms division at the state Department of Justice, likened it to "a license plate falling off a car when driven from a crime scene."
So it's a starting off point for homicide investigations and nothing more, since the bullets might have been lost, stolen, or altered to remove identifiers. How many investigations are we talking about?
Noting that California homicides increased to 2,400 last year from 2,000 the year before -- with 45 percent unsolved -- law enforcement officials urged senators on the committee to vote for the bill. Nearly three-quarters of the state's homicides in 2003 were committed with a firearm.
In 2003, Californians committed 2000 homicides, of which 1500 were purportedly with firearms, of which 45% are unsolved, which would make one believe that this new imposition might offer leads in 675 cases a year or fewer.

Once the kinks are worked, at taxpayer's expense, out of the system.

I suspect the eventual success would match that of Maryland's ballistic fingerprinting program.

Never mind, though; ultimately, the goal is to drive all bullets and guns out of the hands of non-professionals and to ensure that those guns in the hands of professional law enforcement are safely in a security camera viewing room while the guns in the hands of the professional lawbreakers are pointed at the law-abiding.

California lawmakers are doing something!!!1!, which should get them in the paper and, occasionally, on the blogs.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:49 AM