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Sniper Case Renews Debate Over Firearm Fingerprinting October 18, 2002 By FOX BUTTERFIELD WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 - The sniper shootings in the suburbs of Washington have produced an intense debate over whether the government should create a nationwide database of ballistic fingerprints, electronic images of the unique markings that every gun makes on the bullet it fires and the shell ejected from it. While the debate, like many gun issues, is clouded by ideology, much of the argument is over how well such a system would work. Firearms experts say a national database of ballistic fingerprints would be practical, accurate and a major help to law enforcement. "What a fabulous opportunity it would be to have a system that gave you the make, model and possibly the purchaser of a gun, just from a shell casing ejected at the crime scene," said Randy Rossi, the director of the firearms division of the California Department of Justice. "It would be just like a criminal leaving his license plate at the crime scene." "You can't question the technology," Mr. Rossi said. "It is already being used to solve hundreds or thousands of cases." But questioning the technology was exactly what President Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, did on Monday when he repeated the doubts that the National Rifle Association has long expressed about such a system. "The more a gun is used," Mr. Fleischer said, "the less accurate the tracing can become." In addition, he said, "A simple nail file put down the barrel of a gun can alter the amount of tracing that's on a bullet, and therefore change the accuracy of fingerprinting, very unlike any fingerprinting of human beings." What is needed is not new gun laws, Mr. Fleischer said. "Certainly, in the case of the sniper, the issue is values." Despite the skepticism, Mr. Fleischer said later that Mr. Bush favored studying such a system, as the N.R.A. has also proposed. Part of the technology is already in place, known as the National Integrated Ballistic Identification Network. It has allowed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to say with certainty that the 11 people shot by the Washington-area sniper were shot with the same gun, using .223-caliber ammunition. In some cities, including New York, law enforcement officials have already made more than 700 matches of bullets or shell casings recovered in crimes to guns since the system was put into place in 1996, said Joe Vince, the former head of the crime gun analysis branch at the agency. Mr. Vince helped develop the system. In Houston, the police recently solved the killing of a security guard and the separate killings of two store clerks in an armed robbery by matching the shell casings in the three killings to a .40-caliber gun. The weapon was eventually found in the apartment of a suspect. With the ballistics evidence, the suspect was convicted and sentenced to death. But the National Rifle Association has many arguments against such a system. In a statement released today, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the group, said gun fingerprinting would not work if a criminal "deformed" the barrel of a gun or its firing pin. Nor would it work if a gun was stolen, Mr. LaPierre said, because gun tracing by the firearms bureau can track a gun only to the buyer. The rifle association says that most guns used by criminals are stolen. The proposed system would also fail unless the 200 million guns already owned by Americans were test fired and had their bullets and shell casings entered into the database, Mr. LaPierre said. If that happened, the system would be tantamount to national gun registration, which the rifle association considers a first step toward government confiscation of firearms, he said. Mr. Vince said of Mr. Fleischer's doubts: "All I can say is, the White House must have been misinformed. Every study ever done on this has shown that it is an extremely effective system." The technology, developed by a Canadian company, Forensic Technology Inc., is used in 27 countries, including Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Israel, Thailand and Australia, said Pete Gagliardi, a vice president of the company and a former high-ranking firearms bureau agent. All these countries use the technology as the United States does, just to match bullets or shell casings to a crime gun. None have created a national database. As for Mr. Fleischer's claim that the rifling marks on a bullet degrade when a gun is fired often, Mr. Vince said, "We test-fired a gun 5,000 times, and the technology was able to match the first round with the last round." He added: "But no one shoots a gun that many times anyway. A criminal might fire 10 or 20 times with the same gun." If a criminal put a nail file down the barrel of a gun, as Mr. Fleischer suggested, "the technology would pick this up," Mr. Vince said. Moreover, he said, the firearms bureau has found that criminals rarely tamper with the inside of a gun. As for the rifle association's view that the system would fail because criminals steal their guns, Mr. Vince responded, "That simply is not true." Criminals want certain guns, usually semiautomatic handguns, and because most of those are relatively new, the best place to get them is from a store or an illegal gun trafficker, he said. Mr. Vince said criminals want a gun "new in the box," a weapon that has not been used in a crime. Guns used in previous crimes would be likely to bring more charges if the criminals were caught. To Mr. Rossi of the firearms division in California, the question is not whether the technology works, "it is whether we have the political will." A national ballistic fingerprint system would not work immediately because, as was true of fingerprints, when they were first introduced in the late 1920s, a limited number of guns would be entered at first, Mr. Rossi said. But the more guns that are entered, the more effective it becomes, he said. At the end of the Clinton administration, the firearms bureau began a pilot program with Glock, a major manufacturer of handguns, in Smyrna, Ga., to see whether it would be easy for a gun maker to enter an electronic image of the shell casing when each new gun was test fired at the factory. The process took only a few seconds and was not disruptive to the factory, Mr. Vince said. Only Maryland and New York have laws requiring that ballistics data be kept on all handguns made and sold in those states. The Maryland State Police lobbied for the Maryland law, passed in 2000. It requires the manufacturer to send a test-fired shell casing with each gun it sells. The federally licensed firearms dealer must submit the casing to the state police with the application to buy the firearm. In two years, 17,700 handguns have been entered into the Maryland system, said Bud Frank, a spokesman for the Maryland State Police. Shell casings found at crime scenes have been matched to weapons in two cases, and they are part of active investigations, Mr. Frank said. 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