I imagine if one is willing to shoot somebody they are not above stealing ammo.

Plan B. .410 revolver. No dropped shells, and you can not put a seriel number on buckshot

From the group that believes in unicorns such as ballistic microstamping/fingerprinting comes another "brilliant" scheme.

They never learn from past failure. The stupid -- it burns.

The politician sat down and the guy who owns the company made what was basically a sales pitch to require everyone to buy his $$$ equipment and pay him huge $$$$$ licensing fees as well as a royalty $ "per cartridge".

No questions from the media or the attending politicians hoping for some news coverage. But they "did something".

Of course, there will be some contributions to selective political campaign funds from the corporation.

They can't even track 70% of the serial numbered guns they find now, but they will magically be able to track the billions of used cartridge cases with microstamping every year.

Then, when revolvers become the weapons of choice, ....? Another "loophole" they have to close.

Register every bullet. Each one gets a cellular transmitter and its own IPv6 address. IPv6 has a 3.4 x 10^38 address space so we can make lots of them and track every bullet from a cell tower. Places without cell towers are all Republican and no one cares about them.

LE can investigate high concentrations of bullets. No one would much care about a gun with no bullets...

....

......

...well unless maybe it was a bad gun with a bayonet actually attached..........

Then again I'm sure criminals would register their ammunition too.

This idea is about as smart as collecting DNA samples from everyone in the world for a database.

Drop a handful of miscellaneous caliber-appropriate casings randomly picked up from a shooting range at your next gangland murder, let the police tie themselves into knots chasing everybody down.

I think the real issue is that they have no idea what mass production of ammunition looks like. I also think they don't care, or actually want, the vast spending increase in machinery and tracking (and the subsequent slowdown of the production lines) and the bureaucratic snafus and understaffing, a la voter ID laws and the subsequent shutting down of ID-issuance centers.

Thousands of rounds PER SECOND are manufactured, on average, every day. Probably tens of thousands.

Not to mention the plausible deniability built into the system. I'm buying a box of ammo. The manufacturer SAYS that code "X" is inscribed on the inside of every single bullet and every single casing in the box.

I have no way to verify this without opening the box and ripping open every round of ammo and looking at it under a 10x microscope with a good light source. For all I know the code is wrong or the code is missing.



All you can prove is that I bought a box of ammo with both a UPC and a box ID barcode on it. Whether the ammo matches the box is anybody's guess.