Thursday, November 15, 2007

BATFE's new Stormtrooper

Apparently the BATFE has a new leader and since Ted (Chappaquiddick Killer) Kennedy likes him, I must come forth to despise him. The US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts and a lifelong resident of that same state huh? Wonderful. So, when is he going to resign his position as US Attorney so he can take over the SS,,,I mean BATFE? You surely don't think it's right for him to do both do you? Wouldn't there be some potential conflict of interest there?

So Teddy has a press release all pretty and flowery already released, the link to that is here. I think I may go through this with you.

In his book, Private Guns, Public Health, David Hemenway from the Harvard Injury Control Research Center observed that, “Each day guns were used in the commission of about three thousand crimes. The U.S. rates of death an injury due to firearms and the rate of crimes committed with firearms are far higher than those of any other industrialized country.”

I must have missed that, where did you get those statistics again? I believe you'll find them not quite true. By the way, how many violent crimes were stopped by the presence of an armed citizen?

Just last week, the International Association of Chiefs of Police – IACP – took a dramatic stand against the escalating gun violence in our communities – releasing a comprehensive report with 39 key recommendations to reduce gun violence. The Chiefs’ compelling report and specific recommendations are a clear call to action. Without further delay, Congress and the Administration need to do our part by enacting concrete reforms that will reduce crime and protect the safety of police officers and all Americans. We all know what needs to be done and it’s a scandal that we have done so little for so long.

W
e could do something to prosecute drunk drivers that kill people too. I don't think there's a statute of limitations on murder Mr. Kennedy. Let's take a look at these reforms shall we? Let's take a close look at the BS the leftards are spouting.


We need to close the gun show loophole once and for all.

What loophole is this? Licensed dealer to citizen is already taken care of.

We need to renew the assault weapons ban.

To do what? The last one did nothing more than ban cosmetics. It did nothing to reduce crime. Why do you idiots always need another law when the ones we already have aren't enforced?

We need to pass Senator Feinstein’s bill for stricter requirements on the sale of extremely dangerous fifty-caliber sniper rifles.

Yeah, so much more dangerous than anything else that you can see them being used in most of the really major crimes already because every criminal wants to try to lug a 40+ pound almost 5 foot long weapon stealthily into a spot with which to rob Mr and Mrs Jones.

We need to amend federal law to ensure that all cop killer bullets are banned.

Could we possibly get a few more buzz words into this article? Exactly which bullets are you referring to? A FMJ 30.06 round will kill a cop, or anyone else it hits. So will my .45 with a head shot. Which bullets are you trying to ban? Oh wait, you're a Democrat, the answer is all of them.

We need to do more to see that law enforcement has access to the newest and most effective crime-solving technologies – like microstamping.

Which I believe has already been shown to be of little use, horrendously expensive and unreliable.

The IACP’s impressive work in producing this ground-breaking report should not go ignored. I’m hopeful that we can work together, across party lines, to reduce gun violence, solve gun crimes, protect our police officers and do all that we can to make our communities safer. Perhaps our dialogue today will be one positive step forward in that direction.

The dialoge that will make our police officers and communities safer has already been written. In case you forgot it says....

THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello my name is Todd Lizotte, I am the co-inventor of Microstamping.

MICROSTAMPING AS A DETERRENT:

An argument I have seen is that microstamping could create a deterrent and shift criminals from semi-auto handguns to revolvers. In essence this would mean a shift or reduction of a criminal’s effective firepower.

Plainly speaking firepower is the amount of damage you can cause within a given time frame. However, effective firepower is a combination of variables including the type of firearm, the ammunition, and most importantly the gun handling skill of the shooter.

Firing a revolver accurately takes more skill than a semi-auto handgun. And when you have no skill at all in firing, odds are you are going to be limited in the damage you can cause.
Another point is revolvers are “dual action”; the criminal has to pull the trigger fully for each round fired where as semi-auto are typically single action firearms.

Most drive by shootings cause death by the fact that a hail of bullets is fired randomly within seconds and reloading is easy by exchanging a magazine.

What is good about microstamping is that AB1471 targets the growing use of semi-automatic handguns used to commit crimes. Microstamping makes sense for that segment and if it creates a shift to revolvers, knives or baseball bats, that shift will at least give potential victims a fighting chance or possibly limits the chance of innocent people becoming victims of stray bullets.

MICROSTAMPING: PLANTED CARTRIDGE THEORY

Forensic investigators use crime scene reconstruction methods to analyze various patterns; scene evidence and projectile trajectories are used to track back to the firing location and to match projectile location to cartridge location, i.e. cartridge ejection patterns. Projectile locations have a specific location and an angular trajectory (They can show movement of the shooter, angle and elevation of the firearm), so it is possible to match the two patterns.

In an exchange of gun fire; the criminal is firing the handgun and potentially moving at the same time. These actions are mirrored in the pattern of the cartridge casings being ejected. If the person then randomly drops or plants cartridges, those dropped cartridges would not follow the pattern that occurred during the actual action.

A common criminal who commits a murder or engages in a fire fight, is not going to be in the right frame of mind to take into consideration these types of ideas. Fight or flight response takes over.

The other big issue with the dropped/planted cartridge scenario is that the physical evidence is analyzed; powder or gun shot residue (its type, age, and oxidation), oxidation of the cartridges themselves (fresh versus old), finger-prints on the cartridges, odd things (cartridge with pocket lint, dirt, fingerprints, odd primers, reload status) and the standard ballistic markings on the projectile (ejector marks, extractor marks, firing pin marks). Most forensic professional tend to laugh at these ideas. People who comment on these scenarios figure highly trained forensic examiners can’t tell a freshly fired cartridge from one that has been sitting on a firing range for a few weeks or months.

This scenario also requires that the criminal can locate a firing range, find the right caliber cartridge of the same vintage, make, fired from the same firearm that they own.
If the criminal reloads, they will need to use a similar powder and projectile consistent with that ammo and the same primer. This is a tall order for the common criminal who truly cares less about these issues, since in their mind they will never get caught.

The planted cartridge scenario is not realistic for nearly all gang or moment of opportunity based heinous acts or crimes.

Another point is that planted cartridges have a history and by planting them at a crime scene the criminal is just leaving more leads to follow. Maybe those planted cartridges will lead to the place where the cartridges were taken, maybe that range has video taping system (most do these days for liability), or requires people to show drivers license and sign a form to enter the range area.

By planting cartridges at the crime scene the criminal is providing further opportunities to recover good finger prints and law enforcement can use other data and network information to track the person down since most people who commit these types of crimes tend to have extensive police records and have fingerprints on file.

The fact is that planting cartridges is an interesting theory, but in reality, it doesn't happen now and modern forensic crime scene investigation methods are more than capable of overcoming this type of TV based scenario.

IMPACT TO LAW ABIDING CITIZEN:

Microstamping is a passive device, where no registry and no bureaucracy are required. It uses the same trace system that law enforcement currently uses today and all of the info is held by the firearms industry. There is no change to the legal owner’s liability or responsibility.

One specific invariable, is if you have your firearm stolen, with or without microstamping and it is subsequently found at a crime scene, it doesn’t matter; you are getting a knock at your door. So, unless you are a very unlucky person who gets their firearms stolen this does not affect you. Even if you firearm is stolen, this at least helps the police ID the firearm the first time it is used instead of years later.

I view this as the most benign technology possible to provide law enforcement with a new tool for identifying trafficking patterns, while maintaining firearm owner rights.

As for cost to the industry, we have press released that the technology will be provided to industry on a royalty free basis for semi-automatic handguns for commercial applications. So there is no cost to use the technology by the industry.

People wonder why we did this. The reason is simple; the patents cover other applications outside the field of firearms that we want to pursue. To allow us to do that, we would provide a license to industry that covers only the firearm related application.

THE BENEFIT TO LAW ENFORCEMENT:

Law enforcement uses trace data like microstamping to pin point crime gun sources, which are either stolen firearms or straw purchased firearms. The shorter the time between the first time the firearm is sold and the time it is identified is important data to map patterns of trafficking, to target firearm trafficking networks.

Microstamping if definitely an investment towards the future, providing firearm trafficking data within a shorter time frame, since microstamping identifies the firearm the first time it is used, instead of when it is first recovered. Figuring the cost per firearm is about a couple cups of coffee at the worst case scenario.

Firearm trafficking becomes vulnerable to new data analysis techniques such as, Pattern and Link analysis as well as social network analysis, but only when the analysis of the data can form into patterns within a “narrower window of time”.

Microstamping is targeting the traffickers, the theft rings and the network. Most people do not understand that the reason firearms get stolen from someone’s house is that for some reason those people are targeted.

It is not uncommon for firing ranges or gun stores to be staked out by criminal networks. These people want to find who have firearms, follow them home and find out their schedule and then steal the firearms. In some cases it is people they know who steal the firearms. So, when you report this theft, this information is used in a map to identify a possible theft ring.

This is just like hunting terrorists; you need INTEL from all different sources to begin to develop a pattern, that pattern then allow you to deploy resources more effectively.

Hope this gives some insight into the true nature of microstamping.

You can see more on the technology on www.microstamping.net

Anonymous said...

somehow there seems to be a conlift in your comments. so the criminal is too dumb to file off a serial number, change a firing pin, or police his brass, but smart enough to case a store, track a customer, case his house and schedule, and then steal the guns. We don't need more government programs or data on our personal property, what we need is the police to do their job, and put these offenders away for life, instead of letting them out to commit these crimes again, most of these problems stem from repeat offenders that could have been stopped. and if the guns were stolen anyways, then having the stamped number won't help much, since regular ballistics has been able to trace recovered bullets for decades anyways