Daniel Weintraub: Sniper case has Lockyer in
political cross hairs
By Daniel Weintraub -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, October 27, 2002
A sniper terrorizing Washington D.C. and surrounding counties has indirectly
sent a political shiver up the spine of California's top law enforcement officer,
a longtime advocate of gun control who suddenly finds himself a reluctant
partner of the National Rifle Association.
The NRA has been quoting a study by Attorney General Bill Lockyer's Justice
Department that was strongly critical of so-called ballistic fingerprinting, the
process that seeks to use computers to match bullets or spent cartridges with
the guns that fired them.
Lockyer has distanced himself from the study and refused to make it public,
even though under state law he was required to submit it to the Legislature 16
months ago. Instead, he has endorsed the very concept the study slammed: a
national database of ballistic records that gun advocates fear would be the
first step toward a universal gun registration program.
We're not talking here about the kind of one-to-one comparison that police
say has linked a semi-automatic gun seized in Maryland last week to the string
of sniper killings in that region. That kind of match is done by firing a suspect's
weapon and directly comparing the markings on the bullet to bullets collected
at the crime scene.
The electronic equivalent would require gun manufacturers to test-fire every
new weapon and collect an electronic image of the unique markings made on
the bullet and spent cartridge. Those images would then be stored in a
computer database and compared electronically to images of markings on
bullets or cartridges recovered from crime scenes.
The federal government uses the technology now, but its database includes
images only from guns seized from criminals -- not those owned by law-abiding
citizens. And New York and Maryland, which have databases from new
handguns sold in those states, have far smaller samples than California would
be handling.
The viability of ballistic tracing on a mass scale was the subject of an intense
though civil debate within law enforcement and firearms circles until last
month, when the Washington D.C. area sniper began a shooting spree that left
10 people dead and three wounded.
That's when gun control advocates seized on the crimes to push for the
national database. "If we are going to enforce the law, we need to ensure
that our police officers have the best tools for the job," said Michael Barnes,
president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
But NRA President Wayne LaPierre countered that such a system could be an
unwieldy mess that would cost millions of dollars to build and maintain while
producing little benefit to law enforcement.
LaPierre quoted from a study Lockyer's Bureau of Forensic Services produced a
year ago in response to state legislation. Although the law required the study
to be submitted to the Legislature by June, 2001, Lockyer has said the report
is only a preliminary draft and has not forwarded it to lawmakers or made it
public.
But I was able to obtain a copy from other sources, and a quick reading of the
nine-page document makes it clear why Lockyer wanted to keep it under
wraps.
The study, by laboratory director Frederic Tulleners and a panel of law
enforcement experts, involved the firing of more than 2,000 bullets from nearly
800 pistols. Specialists then tested a database to see how often the guns and
their bullets could be matched.
When even the controlled study produced a high number of misses and false
positives, the experts concluded that a mass sampling of new guns by
computer wouldn't be effective. A California system, which would catalog more
than 100,000 new guns every year, would "likely create logistic complications
so great that they cannot be effectively addressed," Tulleners concluded.
The report also said anyone with a simple tool and five minutes on their hands
could change a gun's signature to the point that the computer could no longer
match the markings on a bullet with those from the test firings.
Many of the study's findings were disputed in a response prepared for Lockyer
by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which runs the
federal database of markings from guns seized from criminals.
The BATF said the California study was fatally flawed because it used
ammunition issued to federal law enforcement agents, which is made with a
harder metal than bullets typically used by criminals and thus doesn't pick up
as many markings as common bullets do.
This debate, colored by ideology as much as science, isn't going to end soon.
But to make an informed decision, the public needs more information, not less.
Lockyer has already shared his department's findings with gun control
advocates and the NRA. The least he can do is give the same courtesy to the
California lawmakers who asked for the study and the taxpayers who paid for
it. |
