NOTE: I originally posted this article on June 02, 2013, but new developments in California have provided an opportunity to update it, first on January 24, 2014, and now (02-17-15).  The California case is finally in the courts.  The current update is at the end of the article, but by all means, read the article on the way there.

Politicians long gone from public life often cast a long, and destructive, shadow.  So it is with the Governator, Arnold Schwarznegger, who in 2007 signed a micro stamping law with a delayed trigger.

Firing Pin

The law required all exclusive patent issues to be resolved, and also required that the make, model and serial number of the firearm be “microstamped” on two places on each piece of fired brass.  That day, at least to the satisfaction of the California Department of Justice, has arrived:

…at a Los Angeles news conference Friday, [Attorney General Kamala] Harris announced that micro-stamping had cleared all technological and patenting hurdles and would be required on newly sold semiautomatics, effective immediately.

‘The patents have been cleared, which means that this very important technology will help us as law enforcement in identifying and locating people who have illegally used firearms,’ Harris said.

It has long been an integral part of anti-freedom tactics to embrace the possible.  If it’s impossible to ban guns, do everything possible to make them so expensive, so difficult to obtain, so difficult to use, that such regulations and laws become a defacto gun ban.  Selling the wonders of technology as a means of crime control has always been an integral part of this tactic, and one of the most deceptive—and useless–-bills of goods gun banners have attempted to sell in recent years is micro stamping.

Micro stamping consists of laser engraving unique identifying numbers or codes on the firing pins of firearms on the theory that this identifying information will be transferred to the metal of cartridge primers.  All the police need do—as the anti-gun fable goes—is pick up expended cases at the scene of a crime, read the information from the primer and the case is solved, or so anti-freedom activists would have us believe.

Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, micro stamping is unreliable.  Infowars.com noted: 

A 2006 University of California (Davis) study concluded that laser cutting of the firing pin was feasible but the resulting stamping was inconsistent…

The University of California (Davis) study showed that the vast majority of marks left in the primer were unreadable. Other studies by the firearms industry found similar results.

Other studies have found the same—and worse—results.  The metals used in the production of primers are not of absolutely consistent hardness, even within a given batch.  If the metal is just a little too hard, little or nothing will be transferred to the primer.  Too soft and similar problems result.  Even dirt or other debris between the firing pin and primer interfere.  In addition, the requirement for a second transfer point makes consistent stamping all but impossible as cartridge cases are made of brass, aluminum or steel, all of which produce very different results.  Any legislative attempt to make cases and primers perfectly consistent would make ammunition unaffordable, another wrinkle on a  long-time anti-gun tactic to ban guns by banning ammunition.

Micro stamping is also expensive.  Remington believes a micro stamping mandate would add at least $12.00 to the cost of every firearm, but this estimate is merely for imprinting a firing pin.  Requiring more than one imprint would be wildly expensive.  Tooling and production costs could easily run into the tens of millions of dollars, which is why many firearm manufacturers have moved to more firearm and business-friendly environments, and the exodus is far from over.

Laser engraving is not persistent.  As every study has shown, no method of laser engraving is particularly long lasting.  Some wear very rapidly, while others tend to last somewhat longer.  The mere act of firing a gun will degrade any laser engraving.  Anti-gunners would surely want to make changing or removing the engraving a felony, but this would inevitably catch the law abiding when normal wear was discovered on a firing pin.  This too is a part of the anti-gun strategy of making gun ownership prohibitive where outright bans can’t be enacted.  That the innocent might be imprisoned, their lives destroyed, means little to true believers who see such abuses as nothing compared with banning the gun by imprisoning law-abiding gun owners.

Micro stamping is easily defeated.  Only a few minutes of effort with an emery board or fine sandpaper is sufficient to damage or erase the laser engraving on a firing pin.  Even vigorous cleaning of a dirty firing pin will degrade laser engraving.  Simply changing firing pins would utterly defeat micro stamping.  Of course, anti-gunners would demand that such actions be felonies and care nothing for the imprisonment of the law abiding who unwittingly degrade the engraving through normal cleaning, or who replace a broken or worn firing pin, a gun part that wears more rapidly than most others.

This mandate would inevitably lead to regulated and registered firing pins and other parts bearing laser engraving.  The costs of the bureaucracy necessary to implement and track such things would be outlandish, to say the least.  Imagine the paperwork, months–even years–of waiting for government approval, the fees, inspections and certifications necessary to purchase and install a $10.00 part, without which a gun is useless, which of course is the point.

Micro stamping provides the mere illusion of crime suppression.  The CSI series of TV programs have led the public to harbor unfortunate ideas about crime solving.  The state of the art labs inhabited by TV actors full of almost magical equipment are sets and props.  There is no universal fingerprint database; the memory requirements are too high, to say nothing of the imaging difficulties. There is no such thing as inputting a partial fingerprint into a computer, which will, within seconds, spew out the name and address of its owner.  Consider how long fingerprint technology has existed, then imagine what it would take, in hardware, software and money, to produce a micro stamping database, which could begin only now and would exclude the hundreds of millions of guns previously produced and in circulation.  In reality, forensic evidence is used primarily after a suspect has been identified, and then only to help link them to a crime scene.  Most crimes are solved the old fashioned way: by cops talking to people.

Leave no case behind: there are a wide variety of simple ways to defeat micro stamping apart from dealing with a firing pin.

The easiest way is simply to use a weapon without that feature.  The California law involves only semiautomatic handguns.  Revolvers, shotguns and rifles are not affected.  There will still be hundreds of millions of non-micro stamping firearms. Anti-gun forces would try to ban and/or criminalize all weapons without that feature, but would be unlikely to accomplish it, and if they tried, the public would engage in mass non-compliance.  Criminals?  They don’t obey the law.

If there are no cases left behind, micro stamping is useless.  This would be very easy to accomplish.  Revolvers do not eject their cases upon firing, and it would be a simple matter to stop to pick up any cases ejected by semiautomatic pistols or any other kind of firearm.  A wily crook could simply collect micro stamped cases at a shooting range and leave a few behind, sending the police on multiple wild goose chases.  They would have no choice but to fully investigate every possible lead, and remember that the resources depicted on CSI do not, for the most part, exist.  Running down a single stamped primer–if it could be read at all–would take days, even weeks of effort, and in most cases, would lead nowhere, but occupy officers for countless, fruitless hours.

The no-solution solution: let’s assume the best possible best-case scenario.  A California man is shot and killed in a dark alley—there are no witnesses–and a single piece of expended brass is found near his body.  The primer is examined, the micro stamping left on it is, amazingly, perfect and legible, and it is entered into the massive, all-knowing federal registration computer which reveals that the weapon that fired the bullet and ejected the case was originally purchased 12 years earlier in another state by Mr. Bob Smith, 123 Anytown Ave., Anytown, Anystate.  That’s great, isn’t it?  We know who shot the unfortunate man in the alley!

Actually, all we know, and all we can possibly prove, is the firing pin that left the impression on the primer was originally installed in the gun bought by Bob Smith in another state 12 years ago. The police still must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Bob Smith actually bought the gun 12 years earlier, that the gun has been in Smith’s possession ever since, that Smith was in that alley on the date and at the time of the shooting, and that Smith actually pulled the trigger of that specific gun and that the bullet seated in that particular case, fired from that gun, struck and killed the victim.

Probably Smith sold that gun to a friend five years ago, and the friend moved, and after the week it took to locate him, the police learn the gun was stolen in a burglary of his car three years ago.  From there, it went through so many criminal hands there’s no telling who had it that night in that California alley.

All that a micro stamped primer can tell the police—if it works at all—is who originally bought a given firearm–perhaps who originally bought the firing pin.  It proves nothing else, nothing at all.  The murder weapon might have been lost, sold, stolen, removed from Smith’s home for the shooting and replaced thereafter, the firing pin might have been replaced by Smith who thought it defective, found in the garbage by a criminal and installed in another gun, the possibilities go on and on.

Any criminal stupid enough to leave a micro stamped case at a crime scene would be highly likely to be caught anyway, and not by the micro stamped case.  Thankfully few criminals are true masterminds of the kind popularized by fiction, but fewer are that stupid.  That’s just not the way crimes are solved.

In order for any micro stamping system to have the faintest hope of working, all firearms would have to be micro stamped and universal registration–of guns and all firing pins ever manufactured–would be mandatory.  California’s requirement fro two distinct and separate stamps would greatly complicate any such effort.  While compulsory registration has long been one of the fondest dreams of anti-gunners, Americans have always vehemently resisted it, rightly recognizing it as the necessary first step to confiscation.  In fact, such registration is currently against federal law, not that federal law has ever stopped President Obama.

Five years ago, Americans would have been skeptical of the possibility of any American government confiscating personal weapons.  With the advent of the age of Obama and not a few politicians, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo talking confiscation, and Connecticut politicians making similar noises, few Americans doubt that it is possible and, taking Mr. Obama’s cues, have engaged in a veritable hurricane of gun and ammunition acquisition.  As this twice updated article is posted, many kinds of ammunition, particularly .22LR, remain hard to find and expensive.

Another necessary step in a comprehensive micro stamping policy would be the draconian regulation of ammunition, which would become very expensive and hard to get.  Many ammunition manufacturers would be driven out of business.  Hand loading would have to be outlawed, for it would render any attempt to place identifying information on bullets—usually considered a close relative to micro stamping—useless.  The entire reloading industry would be wiped out or underground.

Unless this law is overturned, California will have the distinction of being the only state to essentially outlaw the most popular handguns in America.  Few, if any, manufacturers will make handguns for only a single state, particularly one that is already among the most heavily regulated.  For anti-freedom forces, this, and the hope that micro stamping will spread to other states, is not a bug, but a feature.

There is no reality that can dislodge the beliefs of the hardened progressive.  Even if we assume that they are acting in good will—and they are obviously not–-the facts that micro stamping is not remotely cost-effective, can never truly help to solve crimes, is destructive to liberty, and will require a massive and expensive new bureaucracy to implement means nothing to them.  Anything that will disarm the law abiding is good in and of itself.

And criminals?  They don’t obey the law.  That’s why we call them “criminals.”

UPDATE: 01-24-14, 2030 CST:

California politicians never miss a chance to infringe on the liberties of their all but captive citizens, particularly where the right to keep and bear arms is involved.  The Microstamping mandate has born predictable fruit.  Fox News has the story:  

Smith & Wesson does not and will not include microstamping in its firearms,’ the Springfield, Mass.,-based manufacturer said in a statement. ‘A number of studies have indicated that microstamping is unreliable, serves no safety purpose, is cost prohibitive and, most importantly, is not proven to aid in preventing or solving ‘rimes.’

“The microstamping mandate and the company’s unwillingness to adopt this so-called technology will result in a diminishing number of Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistols available for purchase by California residents.’

Southport, Conn.-based Sturm Ruger also announced this month that they will also stop selling their guns in California due to the microstamping law.

Ruger has also withdrawn from the California handgun market.  California law enforcement agencies and officers are exempt, of course.  There is, however, resistance:

This is the latest attempt to undermine the Second Amendment in California by politicians with little to no knowledge of firearms, who seek to impose their liberal values upon those who choose to protect their families with the constitutional right to own a handgun,’ said Chuck Michel, West Coast Counsel for the National Rifle Association, an Adjunct Professor at Chapman University and author of the book California Gun Laws.’

‘The technology doesn’t fully exist yet, but by making it into a law, they [California] in fact enacted a gun law without actually passing one,’ David Kopel, a constitutional law professor at the Denver University Sturm College of Law and Research Director of the Independence Institute, told FoxNews.com. ‘This is an indirect way to ban new handguns from being sold.’

The patent holder of microstamping tech, Todd Lizotte, was part of a Department of Justice study team which concluded that, ‘legitimate questions exist related to both the technical aspects, production costs, and database management associated with microstamping that should be addresses before wide scale implementation is legislatively mandated,’ according to the study which was published in the Association of Firearm and Toolmark Examiners (AFTE) Journal.

So California has implemented a mandate requiring technology that either doesn’t exist or isn’t effective.  Progressives often legislate based on the way they think things ought to be rather than what they are, and this time, courts may have little choice but to strike down what is clearly nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt at an outright ban on an entire class of clearly constitutionally protected handguns.

Lawsuits were also filed against the Golden State this week by the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute challenging the microstamping law saying in a statement this week that they predicted back in 2007 when the law was first passed that it would result in a ‘de facto semiautomatic handgun ban.

This is a case that could end up in the Supreme Court, and might provide fertile ground for drawing clearer lines about what kinds of restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms will be allowable.

UPDATE, 02-17-15, 1950 CST. Fox News Reports (the entire article is worth visiting):

This is about the state trying to eliminate the handgun market,’ said Alan Gura, the lead attorney in Pena v. Lindley, filed on behalf of the Second Amendment Foundation and Calguns Foundation against the Chief of the California Department of Justice Bureau of Firearms. “The evidence submitted by the manufacturers shows this is science fiction and there is not a practical way to implement the law.

‘At some point gun sales will cease,’ he added.

California Eastern District Judge Kimberly Mueller is considering Gura’s request for her to enjoin the state from imposing a ban on the sale of new handguns based on lack of compliance with the microstamping law while the case, first filed in 2009, until the technological challenges are resolved. Although Mueller has not said when she will issue a decision, Second Amendment Foundation officials believe it could come any day. [skip]

The microstamping bill was introduced by the state lawmaker and current Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer, who insists the technology is not only workable, it will make it much easier to solve gun crimes.

‘When we know who bought the crime gun, that’s a significant lead for law enforcement,’ said Feuer co-founder of Prosecutors Against Gun Violence.

If the law were expanded throughout the country, Feuer believes the technology could help solve the approximately 45 percent of gun crimes in the country that go unsolved.

Dr. Dallas Stout, president of the California Brady Chapters, also endorsed the law after pushing for its passage, saying it will ‘provide law enforcement with an important tool to track down armed criminals and help solve gun crimes.

As the article points out, any claim that micro stamping will be an aid to law enforcement is utter nonsense. The money required to build a database alone would be much better spent in other, far more productive ways. Particularly considering that most criminals obtain their guns illegally, it’s clear Stout and Feuer are either badly misinformed or liars.

Without action by Mueller, there will be no way for a California resident to buy a new firearm until the case is ultimately decided, perhaps by the U.S. Supreme Court, said Gene Hoffman, co-founder of Calguns Foundation.

And the California circus continues…

For the time being, why would anyone serious about defending their life and the lives of those they love, remain in California?