New York Microstamping bill ... - Democratic Underground

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New York Microstamping bill ...

Pro:

Albany’s Chance to Be Tough on Crime
Published: June 7, 2010

The gun lobby has been hard at work these past few weeks in Albany trying to block smart legislation that would help police officers solve violent crimes. The measure would require, starting in 2012, that all new semiautomatic pistols sold in New York State be equipped with microstamping technology that would allow police officers to quickly match empty bullet casings found at crime scenes to the weapons that fired them. California already has enacted a similar law.

The microstamping process uses lasers to make tiny markings on a gun’s firing pin and other internal surfaces, identifying the weapon’s make, model and serial number. When a gun is fired, this information is stamped onto the bullet casing. That sounds like a very smart idea to us. The bill has the support of 100 mayors and more than 80 police chiefs around the state.

The gun lobby is pushing back hard. It predictably minimizes the public safety value of microstamping, claiming that criminals would file down all the markings. It exaggerates the cost of the process and claims that it would curtail the availability of handguns in New York. The State Assembly rightly ignored those arguments and has passed the bill. The Senate’s Codes Committee, which deals with criminal justice issues, is scheduled to take up the measure on Tuesday. Committee members should approve it, and Democratic leaders should then quickly bring the bill to a full vote.

More than 1,000 murders have gone unsolved in New York over the past five years. Senators who oppose this bill will need to explain to voters why they would deny police departments critical information that would help apprehend murderers and other violent criminals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08tue4.html

Con:

Another useless gun bill passed by the Assembly

By: Bob McNitt, Outdoors Columnist
Published: June 10th, 2010

I’m not sure who first said “We’ve got primarily idiots running our state,” but it seems with each passing year, that proves to be increasingly true. They can’t pass a budget, close parks to the public on one of the most popular tourism holidays of the year. But the latest bit of idiocy just passed through the Assembly and is now in the Senate Codes Committee. The bill, S06005A, requires that all semiautomatic pistols sold in New York State must have their firing pins microstamped with an identifying number which would theoretically imprint on any bullet casing fired (and ejected) from that gun.

The push to have firearms, specially semiauto pistols, microstamped has been around a long time, but the reasons it’s never caught on is rather simple to understand – unless apparently you’re an anti-gun liberal politician in the New York legislature – it doesn’t do anything to deter crime nor identify criminals using pistols. What it would accomplish, if passed, is to drive the price of pistols so high precious few law-abiding NYS citizens could afford them. It would also drive many legitimate licensed FFL dealers out of business and probably also deter firearms manufacturers from doing business with New York State, period.

The reasons this lunacy of legislative monstrosity makes no sense could fill far more space than this column has room for, but here’s a few. First is that the microstamp on the firing pin can be easily removed in minutes by using a small file or emery board, or replacing it with an un-stamped firing pin. Even those unaltered ones only identify the initial owner and not the current user should the gun be stolen. Since no states bordering New York have this law, law-abiding citizens could simply purchase their pistols in another state. Last but not least, the criminal element might also easily side-step it all by switching to revolvers (which don’t eject the casings after being fired), sawed off shotguns, or rifles.

COBIS, introduced by Gov. Pataki in 2000, is a program to collect identifying data from the shell casings of all new handguns sold in the state. This information is then entered into a database for use by law enforcement to aid in identifying and prosecuting criminals. Since its inception, over a quarter of a million shell cases have been collected and entered into the database at an estimated cost of $32 million and not a single arrest or conviction has resulted. In fact, COBIS has proven to be such a failure that no other state is even considering implementing their own version of it.
http://www.evesun.com/news/stories/2010-06-10/9815/Another-useless-gun-bill-passed-by-the-Assembly/

Text of bill at:

http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=S06005&Summary=Y&Actions=Y&Votes=Y&Memo=Y&Text=Y