California Dreamin'

I'm generally over the whole genre of "Fisking Some Random Anti-Gun Column". Everybody on both sides generally has their minds made up and the whole "I'm not arguing with them, I'm arguing so the undecided people who read it can see my arguments" is just a pipe dream. 

There aren't any undecided people reading 1,000-word columns on gun control on the internet. 

Generally these fiskings are just done by people counting virtual coup in order to get asspats from culture war teammates in their own hugbox, usually by saying "Hurr durr, other team bad!" in a humorous fashion.

Still, I have to recognize game when I see it, and this one is good. It's not just some blogger titillating their comments section by coming up with novel ways to call their opponents "poopieheads"; it's a genuine effortpost and deserves a read.

Here's an excerpt:

Microstamping is straight science fiction. A totally non-viable technology. Steel, brass, and aluminum under momentary pressures varying from 24,000 to 80,000 PSI don’t work this way. Neither the firing pin nor the chamber can in any way reliably imprint a QR code or whatever else someone is thinking onto a spent case. This is basic materials sciences.

This utopian pipedream sits firmly in the realm of ‘wouldn’t it be nice if’ and it will remain there, probably until the end of conventional metallic cartridge ammunition. This suggestion also assigns an absurdly over inflated importance to ballistic matching and tracing in criminal investigations. It isn’t that important. It isn’t unimportant but it isn’t that important. Tracking down people via the social aspects of their interpersonal interactions is going to remain the most reliable method, not checking to see if a microstamp on a casehead can find an owner through a trace report (which takes a good while) to a dealer.

So no, there is no ‘right’ to fire a gun anonymously, beyond the obvious protections you have against unreasonable search, seizure, and privacy in general. There is just no way to make this magic work.

Even if we could get a reliable case print with material durability, which we cannot, a few seconds with polisher compounds or something like swapping firing pins and all the effort to imprint cases is wasted. Heck a modestly forward thinking criminal type could pick up brass from a range and leave it at the scene, or use one of the many brass catcher devices. Reloaded ammunition would carry multiple microstamps. You could make it against the law to remove stamps, like mattress tags, but what particular brand of neerdowell do you believe wouldn’t take a basic defacement step to protect themselves? They already make the attempt with serial numbers.

Go and RTWT.

Actual Anti-Gun Protest in Broad Ripple, 2013

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