Here is a Wall Street Journal article on gun finger printing. Apparantly they use the markings that a firing pin makes on brass. I'm for crime control but I don't like the idea of a govt. database. I've also heard that if you run a rattail through your barrel it will change the markings on the bullet itself. Does anyone know what a rattail is or have a picture of one?
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MONTREAL -- In a conference room at Forensic Technology Inc.'s headquarters here, Robert A. Walsh runs his finger along a picture of a U-shaped dent resembling a crater on the moon. The crater is an enlargement of a microscopic dent in a bullet casing.
Mr. Walsh says it can revolutionize the way guns are traced to criminals. The Clinton administration agrees.
Every gun leaves a unique pattern of minute markings on ammunition, much like a signature, Mr. Walsh explains. If gun makers testfire their weapons before the guns leave their factories -- and catalog images of each signature -- then law-enforcement officials can use spent ammunition recovered from crime scenes in tracing guns, he says, even when the gun itself isn't recovered.
For the past decade, Mr. Walsh, president of Forensic Technology, has been pitching his vision of a big database of ammunition "fingerprints" as a way to fight gun crime. He already has a $45 million multiyear contract with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to help fund its development. President Clinton wants to give Mr. Walsh's project an additional $20 million as part of the administration's budget request.
"Our hope is that the system can do for gun crime in this century what fingerprints did for forensics in the last century," says Bruce Reed, Mr. Clinton's domestic-policy adviser.
Although a test of the data-collection system is only now getting under way at the U.S. unit of Austrian handgun maker Glock GmbH, gun-control advocates have embraced the idea. State and federal lawmakers are introducing bills that would require all gun makers to install image-recording machines in their factories and to log the signatures of the guns they make. The project is likely to figure prominently in any settlement of the municipal litigation the industry now faces.
That the gun-fingerprint database has gained so much momentum so quickly indicates what can happen when technology and politics converge. Rather than announcing broad-based funding aimed at developing the best tracing technology, the Clinton administration has put all of its eggs in Mr. Walsh's basket. One reason is that Mr. Walsh, who stumbled into the gun-tracking business at the right time, has managed to win over both gun makers and gun foes.
What is most marketable about Mr. Walsh's idea is that, unlike the unproven technology in "smart guns," which some see as a way to prevent guns from being fired by criminals, ballistics is a science already in use. The technology dates to the 1800s, when forensic scientists first used marks on bullets to link guns found on suspects to evidence at crime scenes.
But Mr. Walsh's plan to take the technology to the next level -- creating an automated database of the fingerprints of new guns -- might not be as promising as gun foes think. Law-enforcement officers and gun makers point out that criminals can easily outsmart it -- using a nail file to scratch a new gun's firing pin, for example, altering the markings it will leave on ammunition.
The database wouldn't include the estimated 200 million weapons already in circulation. Even if the system worked and turned up a serial number, the number could be used to trace the gun to its first buyer, and not necessarily to the criminal.
"Ballistics is useful in some situations but can be easily circumvented by criminals," says James J. Baker, chief lobbyist for the powerful National Rifle Association, which represents 3.2 million gun owners. Even if the technology were effective, he adds, the Clinton plan to use it as the basis for a database of gun fingerprints "sounds suspiciously like a national gun registry."
It's a Start
None of this deters the 57-year-old Mr. Walsh. "Yes, you can deface some guns" to beat the technology, but it "will prevent some crimes," he says. Mr. Reed, the Clinton adviser, acknowledges the shortcomings, but says: "There are always limitations on evidence."
Mr. Walsh, whose privately held high-tech consulting firm, Walsh Automation Inc. is known for making machines that automatically count the number of chocolate chips in factory-made cookies, became interested in ballistics in 1990, when he was approached by a Canadian firearms examiner who thought his "machine vision" technology could be used to automate the ballistics process.
Crime labs routinely check ammunition markings, but in the past, they have done so only after police recover the gun. In this time-consuming process -- familiar to viewers of television cop dramas -- a firearms examiner shoots the confiscated weapon into a barrel of water, then collects the spent bullet and casing, if any, and compares them under a microscope to ammunition found at the crime scene. Many robberies and murders go unsolved because the guns are never found.
Mr. Walsh formed a new unit of Walsh Automation called Forensic Technology, and poured millions into developing a computerized process that could determine whether two sets of ammunition were a match. With such a machine, a crime lab could compare, say, 60 different pieces of .22-caliber ammunition in about 20 minutes, rather than the 30 days the project might have taken with an examiner using a microscope.
Before he was ready to unveil his computer, however, a rival beat Mr. Walsh to the punch. In 1991, the Federal Bureau of Investigation contracted with Mnemonic Systems Inc. in Washington, D.C., to develop Drugfire, a machine that could compare the marks on bullet casings, the cartridges that hold bullets and are ejected by semiautomatic guns.
Mr. Walsh went back to the drawing board and came up with the idea for what he then thought was a superior technology: a computer that records and compares the markings on spent bullets. Such a machine would be more useful in automatically linking confiscated guns to crimes, he argued, because bullets are recovered in most gun crimes, while bullet casings generally turn up only in crimes with pistols and other semiautomatic guns. (Revolvers retain spent casings in a chamber, while semiautomatic guns eject an empty casing with each shot.)
In 1992, Mr. Walsh presented his Bulletproof machine to the ATF. The agency, which regulates guns and maintains a big computer database of gun serial numbers, was in a fierce turf battle with the FBI, and was eager to make its own foray into automated ballistics. Mr. Walsh offered the only alternative, and he was willing to sell his machines at a sharp discount if the agency bought a lot of them. He quickly landed a $15 million contract.
The ATF gave 86 of Mr. Walsh's machines, free of charge, to police agencies around the country and started trying to sell other law-enforcement officials on his technology. Joseph Vince, who was then chief of firearms enforcement for the agency, recalls that ATF officials called on crime labs, making the case that "bullets were the way to go" because roughly half of gun crimes at the time were committed with revolvers.
The results were poor. Spent bullets are often so mangled that their signature is difficult for a computer to read. Plus, there are so many different kinds of bullets -- brass, lead, copper-jacketed, to name a few -- that the markings can be hard to compare. And, through the 1990s, semiautomatic handguns were becoming more popular than revolvers among criminals looking for increased firepower.
In 1995, Mr. Walsh rolled out another machine that could examine both shell casings and bullets. At the same time, his company made inroads overseas. Thanks to strong sales in South Africa and in the Middle East, among other markets, Forensic Technology became profitable in 1996, he says, adding that sales for the entire Walsh operation tripled to $60 million in 1999 from $20 million in 1990.
But Mr. Walsh soon got another chance to pitch his technology in the U.S. -- this time as a solution to a squabble between firearm makers and gun opponents.
In the mid-1990s, criminals were increasingly using drills and chemicals to obliterate the serial numbers stamped on their weapons, and gun-control advocates in Massachusetts and elsewhere began proposing laws that would force the manufacturers to hide the serial numbers inside their guns. Gun manufacturers objected, claiming it would be too expensive to change their production processes.
Mr. Walsh saw an opportunity. He started talking with the ATF about ways to upgrade his technology, using bullet-casing IDs to catalog the "virtual serial numbers" of new handguns. ATF staffers talked up his idea in a series of meetings in 1996 and 1997 with officials of Glock, which does a big business with police agencies, and with a representative of a gun-industry trade group.
"It clicked that this was a better solution" than suffering the onerous variances in state laws mandating hidden serial numbers, recalls Richard Feldman, then head of a gun-industry trade group. Paul Jannuzzo, a vice president of Glock, adds: "It doesn't infringe on the right to own arms ... it can help to catch criminals ... and it solved the serial-number problem. I don't know what the downside is."
Problems with Mr. Walsh's technology, however, were beginning to surface. Edward Koch, director of the Baltimore Police Department's crime lab, for example, noticed that some criminals have started picking up the bullet casings at crime scenes. "Criminals are getting educated," he says.
Prison wardens in some cities are telling police they have overheard conversations about other ways to foil the system, including changing a gun's markings by scratching the inside of the barrel, running a file against the firing pin to change the markings or replacing the barrel altogether.
Despite these shortcomings, Forensic Technology got a big boost late last year when the Clinton administration decided to do away with the rival FBI system. Mr. Walsh's system won because "we figured out that ATF would ultimately control the program anyway," says Frank Sauer, program manager for the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, a team of FBI, ATF and local law-enforcement officials charged with combining the two systems.
A spokesman for Mnemonic Systems' new parent company declined to comment. But some Drugfire users are fuming. L.J. Stephenson, a program director at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, says his network of labs has a database of 15,978 images based on the FBI's system, all of which "is of no value" because "Drugfire isn't compatible with Forensic's technology. "We have to start over again, and a lot of the evidence is gone. It is a huge burden."
Mr. Walsh says he hopes to come up with a way to incorporate Drugfire into his new system.
Most Likely Compromise
Still, cities suing the gun industry have endorsed Mr. Walsh's project. They had initially demanded that gun makers come up with a way to hide serial numbers. But after gun makers protested, they instead began asking for industrywide cooperation in voluntarily fingerprinting new guns. Of all their demands, the fingerprint database seems the most likely ground for compromise.
Antigun politicians "have about a 100% chance of reaching some consensus with the gun makers on that issue," says Glock's Mr. Jannuzzo. "It would be two-faced of us not to want this," he says. "Our mantra has been that the issue is crime control, not gun control. We boxed ourselves into accepting this."
At the big gun trade show in Las Vegas last month, Mr. Walsh sought to convince gun makers that his machines wouldn't interfere with their production process. To illustrate the point, he carried blueprints of the one machine now sitting on the floor at Glock's Smyrna, Ga., factory. Many gun makers said they might go along with the plan if the government picked up the tab.
But others might not be so quick to sign on, especially now that the National Rifle Association is rallying opposition. Last week, the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action sent an e-mail to gun owners, urging them to "oppose this latest Clinton proposal" to expand the fingerprinting program because it amounts to gun registration and provides "little bang for a lot of bucks."
At Forensic Technology headquarters, Mr. Walsh insists he won't give up. He says he might eventually take the unit public and plans to add several other computerized crime-fighting tools to the fingerprint database. "This," he says, "opens up a whole new area we weren't even aware of several years ago."
___________________________________________
MONTREAL -- In a conference room at Forensic Technology Inc.'s headquarters here, Robert A. Walsh runs his finger along a picture of a U-shaped dent resembling a crater on the moon. The crater is an enlargement of a microscopic dent in a bullet casing.
Mr. Walsh says it can revolutionize the way guns are traced to criminals. The Clinton administration agrees.
Every gun leaves a unique pattern of minute markings on ammunition, much like a signature, Mr. Walsh explains. If gun makers testfire their weapons before the guns leave their factories -- and catalog images of each signature -- then law-enforcement officials can use spent ammunition recovered from crime scenes in tracing guns, he says, even when the gun itself isn't recovered.
For the past decade, Mr. Walsh, president of Forensic Technology, has been pitching his vision of a big database of ammunition "fingerprints" as a way to fight gun crime. He already has a $45 million multiyear contract with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to help fund its development. President Clinton wants to give Mr. Walsh's project an additional $20 million as part of the administration's budget request.
"Our hope is that the system can do for gun crime in this century what fingerprints did for forensics in the last century," says Bruce Reed, Mr. Clinton's domestic-policy adviser.
Although a test of the data-collection system is only now getting under way at the U.S. unit of Austrian handgun maker Glock GmbH, gun-control advocates have embraced the idea. State and federal lawmakers are introducing bills that would require all gun makers to install image-recording machines in their factories and to log the signatures of the guns they make. The project is likely to figure prominently in any settlement of the municipal litigation the industry now faces.
That the gun-fingerprint database has gained so much momentum so quickly indicates what can happen when technology and politics converge. Rather than announcing broad-based funding aimed at developing the best tracing technology, the Clinton administration has put all of its eggs in Mr. Walsh's basket. One reason is that Mr. Walsh, who stumbled into the gun-tracking business at the right time, has managed to win over both gun makers and gun foes.
What is most marketable about Mr. Walsh's idea is that, unlike the unproven technology in "smart guns," which some see as a way to prevent guns from being fired by criminals, ballistics is a science already in use. The technology dates to the 1800s, when forensic scientists first used marks on bullets to link guns found on suspects to evidence at crime scenes.
But Mr. Walsh's plan to take the technology to the next level -- creating an automated database of the fingerprints of new guns -- might not be as promising as gun foes think. Law-enforcement officers and gun makers point out that criminals can easily outsmart it -- using a nail file to scratch a new gun's firing pin, for example, altering the markings it will leave on ammunition.
The database wouldn't include the estimated 200 million weapons already in circulation. Even if the system worked and turned up a serial number, the number could be used to trace the gun to its first buyer, and not necessarily to the criminal.
"Ballistics is useful in some situations but can be easily circumvented by criminals," says James J. Baker, chief lobbyist for the powerful National Rifle Association, which represents 3.2 million gun owners. Even if the technology were effective, he adds, the Clinton plan to use it as the basis for a database of gun fingerprints "sounds suspiciously like a national gun registry."
It's a Start
None of this deters the 57-year-old Mr. Walsh. "Yes, you can deface some guns" to beat the technology, but it "will prevent some crimes," he says. Mr. Reed, the Clinton adviser, acknowledges the shortcomings, but says: "There are always limitations on evidence."
Mr. Walsh, whose privately held high-tech consulting firm, Walsh Automation Inc. is known for making machines that automatically count the number of chocolate chips in factory-made cookies, became interested in ballistics in 1990, when he was approached by a Canadian firearms examiner who thought his "machine vision" technology could be used to automate the ballistics process.
Crime labs routinely check ammunition markings, but in the past, they have done so only after police recover the gun. In this time-consuming process -- familiar to viewers of television cop dramas -- a firearms examiner shoots the confiscated weapon into a barrel of water, then collects the spent bullet and casing, if any, and compares them under a microscope to ammunition found at the crime scene. Many robberies and murders go unsolved because the guns are never found.
Mr. Walsh formed a new unit of Walsh Automation called Forensic Technology, and poured millions into developing a computerized process that could determine whether two sets of ammunition were a match. With such a machine, a crime lab could compare, say, 60 different pieces of .22-caliber ammunition in about 20 minutes, rather than the 30 days the project might have taken with an examiner using a microscope.
Before he was ready to unveil his computer, however, a rival beat Mr. Walsh to the punch. In 1991, the Federal Bureau of Investigation contracted with Mnemonic Systems Inc. in Washington, D.C., to develop Drugfire, a machine that could compare the marks on bullet casings, the cartridges that hold bullets and are ejected by semiautomatic guns.
Mr. Walsh went back to the drawing board and came up with the idea for what he then thought was a superior technology: a computer that records and compares the markings on spent bullets. Such a machine would be more useful in automatically linking confiscated guns to crimes, he argued, because bullets are recovered in most gun crimes, while bullet casings generally turn up only in crimes with pistols and other semiautomatic guns. (Revolvers retain spent casings in a chamber, while semiautomatic guns eject an empty casing with each shot.)
In 1992, Mr. Walsh presented his Bulletproof machine to the ATF. The agency, which regulates guns and maintains a big computer database of gun serial numbers, was in a fierce turf battle with the FBI, and was eager to make its own foray into automated ballistics. Mr. Walsh offered the only alternative, and he was willing to sell his machines at a sharp discount if the agency bought a lot of them. He quickly landed a $15 million contract.
The ATF gave 86 of Mr. Walsh's machines, free of charge, to police agencies around the country and started trying to sell other law-enforcement officials on his technology. Joseph Vince, who was then chief of firearms enforcement for the agency, recalls that ATF officials called on crime labs, making the case that "bullets were the way to go" because roughly half of gun crimes at the time were committed with revolvers.
The results were poor. Spent bullets are often so mangled that their signature is difficult for a computer to read. Plus, there are so many different kinds of bullets -- brass, lead, copper-jacketed, to name a few -- that the markings can be hard to compare. And, through the 1990s, semiautomatic handguns were becoming more popular than revolvers among criminals looking for increased firepower.
In 1995, Mr. Walsh rolled out another machine that could examine both shell casings and bullets. At the same time, his company made inroads overseas. Thanks to strong sales in South Africa and in the Middle East, among other markets, Forensic Technology became profitable in 1996, he says, adding that sales for the entire Walsh operation tripled to $60 million in 1999 from $20 million in 1990.
But Mr. Walsh soon got another chance to pitch his technology in the U.S. -- this time as a solution to a squabble between firearm makers and gun opponents.
In the mid-1990s, criminals were increasingly using drills and chemicals to obliterate the serial numbers stamped on their weapons, and gun-control advocates in Massachusetts and elsewhere began proposing laws that would force the manufacturers to hide the serial numbers inside their guns. Gun manufacturers objected, claiming it would be too expensive to change their production processes.
Mr. Walsh saw an opportunity. He started talking with the ATF about ways to upgrade his technology, using bullet-casing IDs to catalog the "virtual serial numbers" of new handguns. ATF staffers talked up his idea in a series of meetings in 1996 and 1997 with officials of Glock, which does a big business with police agencies, and with a representative of a gun-industry trade group.
"It clicked that this was a better solution" than suffering the onerous variances in state laws mandating hidden serial numbers, recalls Richard Feldman, then head of a gun-industry trade group. Paul Jannuzzo, a vice president of Glock, adds: "It doesn't infringe on the right to own arms ... it can help to catch criminals ... and it solved the serial-number problem. I don't know what the downside is."
Problems with Mr. Walsh's technology, however, were beginning to surface. Edward Koch, director of the Baltimore Police Department's crime lab, for example, noticed that some criminals have started picking up the bullet casings at crime scenes. "Criminals are getting educated," he says.
Prison wardens in some cities are telling police they have overheard conversations about other ways to foil the system, including changing a gun's markings by scratching the inside of the barrel, running a file against the firing pin to change the markings or replacing the barrel altogether.
Despite these shortcomings, Forensic Technology got a big boost late last year when the Clinton administration decided to do away with the rival FBI system. Mr. Walsh's system won because "we figured out that ATF would ultimately control the program anyway," says Frank Sauer, program manager for the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, a team of FBI, ATF and local law-enforcement officials charged with combining the two systems.
A spokesman for Mnemonic Systems' new parent company declined to comment. But some Drugfire users are fuming. L.J. Stephenson, a program director at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, says his network of labs has a database of 15,978 images based on the FBI's system, all of which "is of no value" because "Drugfire isn't compatible with Forensic's technology. "We have to start over again, and a lot of the evidence is gone. It is a huge burden."
Mr. Walsh says he hopes to come up with a way to incorporate Drugfire into his new system.
Most Likely Compromise
Still, cities suing the gun industry have endorsed Mr. Walsh's project. They had initially demanded that gun makers come up with a way to hide serial numbers. But after gun makers protested, they instead began asking for industrywide cooperation in voluntarily fingerprinting new guns. Of all their demands, the fingerprint database seems the most likely ground for compromise.
Antigun politicians "have about a 100% chance of reaching some consensus with the gun makers on that issue," says Glock's Mr. Jannuzzo. "It would be two-faced of us not to want this," he says. "Our mantra has been that the issue is crime control, not gun control. We boxed ourselves into accepting this."
At the big gun trade show in Las Vegas last month, Mr. Walsh sought to convince gun makers that his machines wouldn't interfere with their production process. To illustrate the point, he carried blueprints of the one machine now sitting on the floor at Glock's Smyrna, Ga., factory. Many gun makers said they might go along with the plan if the government picked up the tab.
But others might not be so quick to sign on, especially now that the National Rifle Association is rallying opposition. Last week, the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action sent an e-mail to gun owners, urging them to "oppose this latest Clinton proposal" to expand the fingerprinting program because it amounts to gun registration and provides "little bang for a lot of bucks."
At Forensic Technology headquarters, Mr. Walsh insists he won't give up. He says he might eventually take the unit public and plans to add several other computerized crime-fighting tools to the fingerprint database. "This," he says, "opens up a whole new area we weren't even aware of several years ago."