Gun Control Hitting Michigan

Coleman Young helped screw up Detroit. Now Coleman Young II wants to continue his father's legacy and spread the trouble to all of Michigan.

State Representative Coleman Young II (D), age 23, son of the late Mayor of Detroit, has introduced House Bill No. 5079 which would require that all handguns sold by Michigan FFL dealers on, or after, July 1, 2008, would have to be "ballistically fingerprinted."

The states have been called the "laboratories of democracy" because one state can learn from another's public policy successes or failures. This bill shows that Rep. Young has not learned from the failures of other states, and has not yet learned the value of your tax dollars. HB 5079 would repeat the costly mistakes of other states in relying on junk science. Furthermore, it would create a new, very expensive bureaucracy that would probably cost millions of dollars before finally being cancelled as useless.

So-called "ballistic fingerprinting" is currently in place in Maryland and New York.

In theory, a database of images showing the microscopic marks left on ejected cartridge casings and fired bullets from each handgun sold might provide a useful tool for law enforcement agencies attempting to match such items found at crime scenes with specific guns and their last known registered owners. However, in practice, there is little or no benefit to law enforcement, while the expenses are enormous.

The Director of the Maryland State Police Forensic Sciences Division, John J. Tobin, issued a report in 2004, 4 years after implementation of the MD-IBIS (Maryland Integrated Ballistics Identification System). In it, he stated definitively that: "There have been no crime investigations that have been enhanced or expedited through the use of MD-IBIS. Guns found to be used in the commission of crime are not the ones being entered into MD-IBIS. The program has been in existence four years at a cumulative cost of $2,567,633."

He also referred to the New York experience with the same type of system: "The New York State Combined Ballistic Identification System (CoBIS)...has compiled almost 80,000 cartridge case profiles. There have been no hits reported by CoBIS. The annual budget for CoBIS is approximately $4 million."

In conclusion, Director Tobin said: "The Program simply has not met expectations and does not aid in the Mission statement of the Department of State Police. It is recommended that this Program be suspended."

In January of 2003, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer issued a report entitled: Feasibility of a California Ballistics Identification System. The report concluded that there are significant problems with the technology of such systems and referred to the failures of the Maryland or New York systems to provide any help at all to criminal investigations in their states. Significantly, the report also referred to a report by ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), entitled: The Crime Gun Trace Reports (2002) National Report, which indicates that Ballistics Identification Systems should be considered operable if it generates a hit rate of about 15% after 2 years in operation. Both New York and Maryland have failed in this regard after expending millions of dollars over several years.

According to long-term, comprehensive research by Professor John Lott and others, the reasons for the failure of these systems are many:

1. Criminals rarely buy their guns in gun shops.
2. There is no such thing as "fingerprints" or "DNA" in a gun. There are microscopic tool marks that are subject to change over time, particularly during the "break-in" period when a gun is new.
3. Unlike human fingerprints or DNA, the microscopic tool marks on gun parts such as extractors, firing pins and bolts are very easy to alter with hand tools and common abrasives such as toothpaste.
4. The best available software misses matches or "hits" false matches up to 68% of the time.

While ballistics evidence can be very useful in solving crime. The type of matching that works is when human technicians are matching a known case or projectile to a known gun. Searching a huge database of images for a match is an entirely different process and the technology simply does not exist to create such a system that would help our police officers do their jobs any better.

HB 5079 would leave all details to the State Police and fails to consider costs or effectiveness: "The Department of State Police shall promulgate rules...that establish the type or types of records that are sufficient for purposes of this subsection." If it were to become law, this bill would squander large amounts of money, waste the time of gun manufacturers, wholesalers, and buyers, creating a new potential technical violation for all dealers to be concerned with, all without any probable benefit at all for the People of Michigan.