Reality Check
The Associated Press has a piece on the proposed piece of legislation: Firearms database won’t work, study says.
This isn’t just about firearms, this is about a problem with all of the lists and databases the Hedgemony is building as they keep moving towards Total Information Awareness™ – they are making things more difficult by amassing too many data points, hoping that the answer to all their questions will magically appear.
This particular legislation would require every new firearm to be test-fired and a sample of the bullet and casing entered graphically into a massive database. The concept is that if a firearm is used, you scan the bullet and the database will provide the serial number of the weapon. It doesn’t work. The test rounds are fired to be collected with only the marks from the barrel on them, crime scene bullets go into bodies through clothing, often striking bone or fragmenting. If you manage to retrieve a whole bullet and get a good scan, you are looking at a probabilities percentage for a match. The larger the database, the more probables you will have to look at. In the current system you have scans from weapons and bullets used in crimes, which increases the weight of any match. If you add a few million other weapons that have only been used in target shooting, you will be looking at hundreds, if not thousands of possible matches. Where are the people to do this?
Like everything else, they keep amassing data without increasing the people needed to make the data useful. They have no one to edit the lists to remove the garbage. They keep avoiding the hard work of doing the job right, while wasting time and money on projects that might make sense in another century.
4 comments
Doesn’t work… duh. How clever of them to figure that out.
“Total information awareness,” should they ever manage to attain that nirvana for all of perhaps five seconds before something obsolesces, means that they have a mass of data 99.999999999 percent of which is of no use to anyone pursuing any actual investigation. As you pointed out in the case of crimes with firearms, it just doesn’t work, and the only thing that does work is patient, methodical police work, applying good craft to the evidence at hand. We can make funds available for that, or we can pour money down the rat-hole of “total information awareness.”
Guess which is more likely…
They don’t seem to understand the concept of following the evidence. You don’t decide who’s guilty and then look for evidence to prove it, you discover who’s guilty by finding the evidence that points to that individual. If you don’t follow the evidence, you may miss the real criminal, and in too many cases, the real crime.
If you have a 90% probability match on a million record database, you have 100,000 records to look at – that is not a lot of help. Most firearms instructors can do that just by looking at the bullet determining the caliber, the number of lands and grooves, and the direction of the twist which usually tells you the make of the weapon.
Where are the people to do this?
dude, people don’t do this. computers do, robots do, slaves do. the only people in the world are the ones with huge sums of money. everything else is just a thing, including you and me and the factory workers in china and the sex slaves in the dominican republic.
of course the database will work. you’re just confused about what the database’s actual job is. it’s being sold as a tool to help jail the guilty and exonerate the innocent, but its real purpose is to be just one more legitimizer [is that a word?] for putting more of us behind bars, and keeping us there. accuracy is unimportant.
This is just going to be another failed government IT contract. I’ve seen too many to even want this sucker to go to the RFP stage.