Sniper Shootings Prompt Call for More Gun Control

Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - If the United States had a federal law requiring so-called "ballistic fingerprinting" of every firearm in the country, could police have already caught the murderer coming to be known as the "Beltway sniper?"

That is the assertion in a message sent to supporters of the group formerly known as Handgun Control, Inc.

"As police try to track down and stop this killer, we do know this: sensible gun laws can help law enforcement solve crimes as well as prevent gun violence," wrote Sarah Brady, chairwoman of the Brady Campaign.

Brady noted that ballistic comparisons of the bullets recovered from the victims' bodies had helped authorities link several of the shootings.

"[But] we have also seen the limitations to ballistic fingerprinting laws in their current form," she continued, complaining that the laws are only in force in two states, only cover newly purchased weapons, and only apply to handguns.

"These limitations speak to a need for a national ballistics fingerprinting law for all firearms," Brady argued.

She also used the letter to begin lobbying for a continuation of the federal ban on certain types of military-looking firearms, commonly referred to by opponents of their ownership as "assault weapons," and to solicit funds for her organization.

Americans for Gun Safety (AGS), a group founded by former Handgun Control, Inc. board member Andrew McKelvey, also supports universal ballistic fingerprinting. Matt Bennett, spokesman for the group, said the idea behind the process is similar to that of fingerprinting.

"A particular set of markings [on a bullet] can be matched to all the other [ballistic records] in the system and the top five or six matches come up and then a human expert will look at them and determine if there's a real match," he explained.

AGS argues that the system is accurate even if someone intentionally tries to alter a weapon, or subjects it to heavy use.

"It can degrade slightly, but it is still recognizable," Bennett claimed. "The metaphor we're using is it's like having a scratch on a record. It does degrade the quality of the sound, but it's still a recognizable sound."

Kevin Watson, legislative director for the Law Enforcement Alliance of America (LEAA) - a coalition of current and former law enforcement officers and citizen supporters - disagrees.

"It sounds really neat when you hear just the basic description of it, but when you go into the description of how it would actually work," he said, "it kind of falls apart."

Watson said the "ballistic fingerprint" of a weapon will change over time, and can be altered intentionally.

"In a lot of firearms, you can replace the equipment that leaves these marks," he said, "and, as the firearm is used on occasion, that degrades the marks that are left and sometimes can change them."

Watson described the lack of a basis for comparing ballistic markings to human fingerprints.

"Imagine a fingerprint database where people can switch their fingerprints and their own fingerprints wear down over time after use," he added. "It makes it not that useful of a system."

Attorney Lisa Steele, who specializes in appellate criminal defense cases, agreed. She said it would be relatively easy for a ballistics examiner to make a mistake.

"A recovered bullet has been through a lot. It's gone down a gun barrel, it's been fired into something. It's chipped. It's damaged. It's fragmented," Steele explained.

She said examiners are trained to expect some of the marking on two bullets fired from the same weapon not to match. They are also told, Steele said, to expect many markings to match on two bullets fired from two different weapons of the same caliber and model.

"They're trained to do this. They observe this in the lab," she said. "What the training standards say is, eventually you develop a 'gut instinct' for which of these striation matches are important and which of them aren't."

Steele calls the phenomenon of seeing matches that don't really exist "suggestion bias," explaining that the examiners are not intentionally giving false reports, they simply "expect to confirm what they already believe."

Investigators can also bias ballistics examiners, she claimed, by sharing too much information about a case or the evidence being examined.

"You know some things won't match. You know some things will. You have to make a 'gut,' instinctive decision, and in the back of your head, somebody has given you information that it's supposed to match," Steele said. "Odds are, you're going to say it does match."

The biggest part of the problem, she added, is that unlike classifying human fingerprints, there is no objective reference standard for ballistic "signatures.

Images of human fingerprints can be laid one on top of the other and the number of points of similarity can be counted, Steele explained. In most jurisdictions, criminal judges have established the minimum number of points of similarity that they will accept to validate a fingerprint match.

"There's no such objective measure for ballistic fingerprints," she said.

Watson said another failing of ballistic fingerprints opponents of armed self-defense often ignore is the sheer number of firearms already in private hands in the United States.

"If you were just to do new firearms, that basically means that there would be 200 million firearms that would not be traceable in this system," he explained. "Any criminal would know or would learn that if they wanted to make sure their gun was not traceable in the new system, they would simple make sure they were using a gun that was made before the enactment of the system."

Watson speculated that law-abiding gun owners might not be willing to bring their weapons in for ballistic fingerprinting because of the de facto registration of gun owners such a system would create.

He also disputed Brady's claim that the so-called "assault weapons" ban - which actually banned military-looking semi-automatic firearms, not fully-automatic assault weapons - could have had any effect on the sniper's armament.

"They could be using a gun that they could lawfully purchase today in Maryland, even if the 'assault weapons' ban is in place or renewed," Watson argued. "The notion that, if we renew this ban then we'll somehow pretend to keep certain guns off the street is really kind of nonsense."

Brady's attempt to capitalize on the murders to promote her anti-Second Amendment agenda is "quite honestly shameless," Watson said, especially while police are still looking for the sniper.

"This is a group that, every time tragedy happens, they jump out and say 'We need these [gun control laws] we need these," he alleged. "It's not really all that surprising to see it happen, but it's still shameless."

The premise that a gun control law could somehow affect the behavior of a murderer is puzzling to Watson.

"It's just a nonsense comment to say that somebody is going to break the law about murder, but obey the law about which tools they can use," he said. "It's pretty obvious that people who are not influenced by laws banning murder aren't going to be too influenced by laws banning what tools of murder they can use."

Both Watson and Steele believe that, once a suspect is in custody and ballistics examiners can compare his or her weapon to the bullets and shell casings recovered at the crime scenes, authorities will be able to use that evidence to aid in obtaining a conviction.

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Media and Authorities Fudge Gun Facts in Shootings
By Jeff Johnson
CNSNews.com Congressional Bureau Chief
October 07, 2002

Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - Over the weekend, police linked another shooting to the gunman who killed six people last week in the Washington, D.C., area.

Police say a woman shot and seriously wounded on Friday in Fredericksburg, Va., was struck by a bullet from the same gun used to kill an elderly man Thursday night in Washington, D.C.; and five people on Wednesday and Thursday in the Washington suburb of Montgomery County, Md. (Fredericksburg is about 70 miles away from the general area of the other shootings.)

As police continue their search for one or two suspects in the shootings of those seven people -- six of whom died -- local, state, and federal authorities have been releasing information to the media to encourage public assistance with finding the shooters.

But firearms experts said Friday that at least some of that information has been conveyed in a less than accurate manner.

During an early morning press conference on Friday, Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Charles Moose described the type of weapon investigators believe was used to commit the murders.

"We're willing, at this point, and able to say that from a 90-percent accuracy, we're dealing with a high-speed-velocity round from an assault or a hunting-type weapon," he said. "We're dealing with someone shooting from a distance, someone using a high-velocity round, 90 percent sure that it is a .223 round from a rifle, a hunting rifle, an assault rifle."

Authorities have confirmed that only one shot was fired, striking and killing six of the victims. That fact, and the use of the term "assault rifle," caught the attention of James Chambers, executive director of the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute (SAAMI).

"An assault weapon is a machine gun -- that [means] fully-automatic, and that is a military firearm," he said, explaining that assault rifles, by definition, fire multiple bullets with each pull of the trigger.

Following Moose's comments, CNN Anchor Carol Costello on Friday summarized what officials had reported.

"Five people, all apparently unrelated, random victims, were shot dead by the same gun, according to the chief," she said. "It was a high-powered assault hunting-type weapon with a .223 round."

Chambers said the weapon Costello described doesn't exist.

"That is not an accurate statement. The .223 is a small game cartridge used for small game and varmint hunting. It is about half as powerful as the .30-06 or .308 caliber, which are the big game rifles for deer, elk, antelope, etcetera," he explained. "The .223 is not classified as a high-powered cartridge."

Later Friday morning, Moose called another press conference, intended to eliminate some of the confusion caused by the reporting of his statements.

"When we passed out some information, when we talked about rounds, when we talked about weapons, maybe we created some confusion and so, at the advice of ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) we want to take a few moments to, maybe, clarify some of that information," he explained.

The chief introduced Joseph Riehl, assistant special agent in charge of the Baltimore ATF office, who, along with a team of ATF firearms examiners, he described as "experts in this area."

Riehl displayed four rifles and four cartridges similar to the type believe to have been used by the murderer. He was careful to categorize the weapons and ammunition as "samples."

"We have laid out four samples of ammunition that are possibly used in these shootings. In addition, there are four firearms that are consistent, that are able, again, just samples, that are able to accept these particular rounds of ammunition," he explained. "This is not all of the firearms; there's a list of forearms that would accept these rounds of ammunition. It is too great a list to lay everything out."

At the urging of a reporter, Riehl picked up a Colt AR-15, which he properly identified as a semi-automatic rifle, and held it as he answered questions. He then lifted a bolt-action .223 caliber rifle and compared it to the AR-15.

"This is actually just a bolt-action rifle. This particular weapon could be used for target shooting, possibly hunting and it would not be considered the same as you would some of the other assault weapons," he said, gesturing to the semi-automatic AR-15.

Again, Chambers said the terminology used is simply wrong.

"They're classifying the civilian version of the military M-16, which is the AR-15, as an assault weapon, which is bogus," he said. "The AR-15 is not an assault weapon; it's a semi-automatic or auto-loading firearm ... one bullet per trigger pull."

The press conference apparently did not clear up the misconceptions. Friday afternoon, MSNBC reporter Jennifer Johnson described the weapon with similarly inaccurate terminology.

"The shooter used a high-powered assault weapon or some kind of high powered hunting rifle in all of the cases," she said.

Chambers noted the insistence of the establishment media personalities that the firearm used in the murders was an "assault weapon."

'Media definition'

"The 'assault' term is a media definition for any firearm with certain appendages on it. Our definition, and the military definition of an 'assault weapon' is a fully automatic weapon," he explained.

The .223 cartridge, he continued, is accurately referred to as a "high-velocity" round, because the bullet travels at between 3000 and 3200 feet per second, depending on the weapon from which it is fired and the amount and type of powder loaded into the shell casing.

The bullet is deadly, he added, not because it is fired from a so-called "assault weapon," but because of its accuracy and the characteristics of the wound it creates.

"It is a very accurate round when used by someone with a great deal of experience. You can make very accurate shots from fairly long ranges, out to 500 yards," he said. "That particular bullet when it hits has a tendency as it enters to do some tumbling or rolling, which creates a great deal of [damage]."

Gun industry representatives, who spoke with CNSNews.com on condition of anonymity, said they believe the law enforcement officials who used the incorrect terminology probably did so under the stress of the investigation and the media scrutiny, not in an attempt to intentionally mislead the public.

They were not, however, so forgiving of the establishment media. One such representative said the misuse of the terms "assault weapon" and "high-powered" was "part of an intentional effort to scare people, to make the public afraid of guns."

Inaccurate reporting on firearms issues by the so-called "mainstream" media is something Chambers said he simply expects.

"How the media is reporting this does not surprise me in the least," he said. "I have seen this over, and over and over again, and I don't expect any changes in the near future."

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