Don’t Believe CSI
People watch TV shows and think that law enforcement have all of these great tools that solve all crimes in about an hour – WRONG!
The tools actually used by police departments can take days, weeks, or even months to provide answers.
On All Things Considered Melissa Block did a report on The Low-Tech Way Guns Get Traced.
This is a result of the NRA getting Congress to put restrictions on law enforcement to make existing laws ineffective, and burdening gun dealers, wholesalers, and manufacturers with a lot of unnecessary record keeping. If you are involved in the gun trade and you go out of business, you have ship all of your records to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. How many records do you think MalWart has? Cabela? If BATF is doing a search, you have to search your records to find what they want, even if it means going to an offsite storage site to find a record that is a decade old. This costs money, as does storing the records forever.
This is a cost to business of paranoia.
2 comments
But remember, the NRA says guns don’t kill people, so there’s no reason to trace guns anyhow, right? 😈
They obviously never seen what happens if you use smokeless powder instead of black powder in a cheap cap and ball pistol. It ain’t pretty. What the hell, you don’t need two hands.
At some point someone will say it’s the bullets that are the problem. They have never been hit over the head with a rifle.
Given that a gun data base would use serial number, manufacturer, and caliber for the primary key, trying to generate a list of gun owners would be a major PITA. Names are just too weak for an a good search, and people move too often for addresses to be much help.
Where were they when RealID was foisted upon us by the War on Terror™?