IN AMERICA, one of the prices of freedom is registration of information. Our government has a right to know certain things about us if we are to receive and accept the incredible benefits it provides. In exchange for the unequivocal rights we receive, we are categorized and classified by means of registering the status of ourselves, our houses and our cars -- but not our guns. While gun licenses and registration are required, the newly perfected technique of ballistic fingerprinting that could serve as an additional tracking method is not. The gun control debates that have raged for years focus on banning assault rifles and enforcing waiting periods -- two reforms that might alleviate gun-related crime -- but ballistic fingerprinting could revolutionize law enforcement the way human fingerprinting has.
Ballistic fingerprinting is much like human fingerprinting. When a bullet leaves the barrel of a gun, a specific pattern of imprints and scratches are left on the bullet that are unique to every gun. Like the swirls on our fingers, the notches can be used to determine whether a fired bullet matches a specific gun. There are hundreds of homicides in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area in a year, but the recent sniper shootings have been tied to the gun used by the sniper through use of the ballistic fingerprinting technique. Registering guns can only ensure that the wrong people aren't allowed to get guns -- even though they usually find a way -- but ballistic fingerprinting would provide a positive effect on the system by allowing police a resource for tracking down perpetrators.
A miniature version of a ballistic fingerprinting database is in use in Maryland and has had little success in solving crimes, but there is little denying that funding the system and perfecting it nationwide could provide leads for detectives. The TV show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" is about the technicians who use fingerprints, fibers, imprints, fluids and yes, bullets, to piece together the most baffling of cases. While certainly the show is an exaggeration of reality, it is certainly true that the role of forensics in law enforcement has reached its zenith in the age of the computer and a nationwide database of ballistic fingerprints would go a long way to aid detectives.
There's no problem with gun collecting, but let's not lose sight of the fact that they have been and always will be designed to launch a projectile into a human being at fatal velocities. A gun simply serves no purpose other than to be used as a means of destruction. Other countries have stricter gun laws, even outlawing them in some places, and rates of handgun-related deaths are -- probably not coincidentally -- low in those countries. In 1996, handguns were used to kill two people in New Zealand, 15 in Japan, 106 in Canada and the list goes on (http://goodsforguns.org/nationalfacts/). In America, however, the Constitution prevents us from following suit.
If we can't eliminate guns, we can regulate them by cataloging the guns that are legally out there.
The intrusion on American gun ownership would be minor. President Bush is concerned about violating the privacy of gun owners. Apparently, it is acceptable for the USA Patriot Act to allow the government to pry into personal correspondence and spy on Americans -- and for the government to detain hundreds of suspected terrorists at Camp X-Ray -- and yet we don't require filing of recorded fingerprints from killing machines that are sitting in American homes. The government knows that you have a driver's license, the make, model and year of your car and even where you house the vehicle. With the exception of sitting for long periods of time at the DMV, registration is a fairly painless process. The specifications of a private citizen's gun would be kept in a national database and the owner would never need to worry about it ever again. Nobody gets themselves worked up because the government knows their license plate number and there would be no cause for concern if the government knew what your gun does when it fires a bullet.
The creation of a national database of ballistic fingerprinting may not be 100 percent accurate. But White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer remarked that we might not want to bother: "How many laws can we really have to stop crime, if people are determined in their heart to violate them no matter how many there are or what they say?" Yeah, Ari, why don't you just admit that you and your administration are impotent and unable to lessen crime rates.
Maybe the sniper would have been caught if ballistic fingerprinting was in place nationwide, and maybe not. There are too many easy avenues for bad people to find weapons, but that is an issue for another debate. Just because there are other ways to get guns does not mean fingerprinting of guns should be abandoned. Nobody is claiming that the fingerprinting will be as accurate as it is for humans. But the technical problems can be worked out and the system could be a valuable asset for law enforcement authorities. Invasion of privacy is minimal and, if implemented, a national database would never be public and only serve as a template for comparison with bullets used in crimes. Privacy rights must be paramount in America, but when mere submission of a gun's specifications to a private database is far from intrusive. Stopping violence is a complex issue that nobody has figured out, but we can provide a better system for capturing criminals.
(Brad Cohen's column appears Thursdays
in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at
bcohen@cavalierdaily.com.)
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