The Los Angeles Times ran a story earlier this month about two incidents of criminals shooting at the police. In one incident, two thugs fired at LAPD officers and struck a window next to their patrol car. Though the shooters escaped, thankfully no officers were hurt.

Still, it showed again how dangerous police work can be, and how important the field of ballistic identification is to our men and women in uniform. A recent development in forensic science, however, might help catch armed criminals who shoot at our police officers in the future: The shooter might escape today, but evidence left behind could put them in jail tomorrow.

The term “ballistic identification� generally refers to the different ways forensic firearms examiners can match a shell casing to the gun that fired it. This can help police track down the shooter. One specific method, called “ballistic fingerprinting,� allows forensic laboratories to compare the unique tool marks made by a particular firearm with those found on cartridges fired from that same gun. As useful as this method is, however, there is a drawback: it requires a crime lab technician to have both the cartridge and the gun in order to determine a match.

This dual requirement has contributed to a high percentage of unsolved homicides around the country. According to the FBI, “[a]pproximately one-third of all homicides in the United States are not cleared within the year committed. In cold case homicides, investigators often are forced to work with stale information and a lack of evidence.� Worse still, in the State of California, no arrest is made for about 45% of homicides due to lack of evidence.

In recent years, however, there has been a major scientific advance in ballistic identification that could help close the “evidence gap� in gun homicides. It is called “microstamping,� and if AB 1471 passes in California, the Golden State could be the first in the Union to implement it.

Microstamping refers to a proven technology that enables a firearm to imprint an extremely small set of identifying letters and numbers on each bullet casing that is fired from that gun. Simply, the weapon’s firing pin is engraved by a laser with a unique microscopic code. Each time the pin strikes a primer cap, it makes a tiny impression of that code, legible under a scanning electron microscope. This means that police can use the shells recovered at a crime scene to trace the gun that fired those shells much more quickly and accurately than before. Why? Because recovering the crime gun would no longer be required in the ballistic identification process. The code on the shell casing, identifying the make, model and serial number is identical to the code inside of the gun that fired it. With microstamping, the police only have to read a code to identify the handgun, find out where it was sold, and who first purchased it. The complex, tedious middle step of firearm recovery becomes less important.

This technology has been publicly demonstrated in Sacramento, Los Angeles (three times, in fact) and in Washington, D.C., and has been shown to work as designed. Gun lobby criticisms of microstamping sound quite familiar. About this advancement in forensic science they say that “it costs too much,� or “criminals will get around it,� or “only honest gun owners will be penalized,� or – you guessed it – “it’s a ban on guns.� We’ve heard it all before, and like before, it’s all nonsense.

Take these examples, where the gun lobby invokes two particularly weak sources against microstamping. One is a “study� that isn’t peer-reviewed though it criticizes the feasibility of microstamping after testing with the wrong kind of firing pins (pdf document), and which also drew premature, ambiguous and misleading conclusions that the author’s own university all-but repudiated (pdf document). Another paper (pdf document) criticizes microstamping only after using the wrong microscope (see Page M) – rendering many of its conclusions moot – and shows more sympathy for the “firearms industry� than for public safety.

What really matters in this debate is protecting the lives of our fellow citizens. What really matters is keeping guns out of criminal hands, like those who shot at LAPD officers early this month. What really matters is what the police say about this issue: Over 60 California police chiefs, sheriffs and police organizations say they want microstamping of semi-automatic handguns in the Golden State.

We should all be on the side of the law enforcement and urge the California Assembly to take a common-sense step toward ending gun violence and illegal gun trafficking. California legislators should support their police – the men and women who protect them and regular citizens every day – and pass the Crime Gun Identification Act of 2007, AB 1471.

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(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

When I visited Chicago on July 7 to march with Reverend Jesse Jackson at a protest outside a gun store that was the source of numerous guns traced to crime, it was obvious that I was seeing something larger than just an isolated event. Many Chicago neighborhoods have been seeing their streets flooded with guns and their children shot down in random acts of violence. Chicago was demanding action.

But the gun violence didn’t end, and neither did the outrage. Reverend Jackson has called for a National Day of Protest Against Gun Violence, to remind our leaders that this is not an inconsequential problem, and that steps need to be taken to stop the violence.

On August 28, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, there will be events all across the country to highlight the problem of gun violence. The Brady Campaign with its network of Million Mom March Chapters is joining activists across the country who are planning events in more than 20 cities, and more are expected. You can read more about the events, and our participation, here.

Sarah Brady was recently asked to provide an essay on gun control for a new book on American politics. Here’s part of what she had to say:

The fact is that this debate isn’t about guns at all. It’s about how we as a society relate to guns. It’s about how we buy them, sell them, store them, and use them. When we talk about gun control, what we’re really talking about are ways to encourage people to behave differently around guns. A gun may be just a tool, but it’s a tool whose misuse can have profound and permanent consequences.

Sometimes this debate becomes so entangled in legal arguments and hypothetical situations that the larger picture is lost. Sarah’s point is that gun violence can be addressed by encouraging people to realize that public policies and leadership can help prevent gun violence without preventing legitimate gun ownership. Laws can help keep guns from falling into hands of dangerous people, and can punish those who use guns illegally.

32 people are murdered with guns every day in America. 30,000 a year die from gun violence. It’s an enormous problem, it’s a societal problem, but it’s not an impossible problem.

The book which includes Sarah’s essay is “Why We’ll Win,� by Malcolm Friedberg, and it was released last week.

The Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, published a story this week that discussed disagreements among gun violence prevention groups concerning legislation that has passed the U.S. House of Representatives on June 13, 2007 and was approved by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. This legislation would give states new incentives to report records of individuals who are barred from buying guns to the Federal background check system.

HR 2640, sponsored in the U.S. House by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy and the Senate bill sponsored by U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, would authorize funding to help the states do a better job of reporting records of individuals who are prohibited, under existing law, from purchasing firearms to the Federal background check system. This is no small problem. The best estimates are that more than 90 percent of disqualifying mental health records (as well as 25 percent of disqualifying felony records) are not submitted to the system currently. That’s how the Virginia Tech shooter managed to purchase his weapons from two different licensed dealers. We need to do a better job of compiling complete records of prohibited purchasers.

What has become controversial among supporters of common-sense gun laws is another provision in the legislation which would require states to set up procedures to allow individuals who are currently prohibited purchasers to change that status. Some gun violence prevention advocates are deeply concerned about who, under such a system, might once again be allowed to purchase firearms.

This is a legitimate concern, and we’ll have to watch carefully what happens in the states if this legislation becomes law. Still, we have a historic chance to put hundreds of thousands of new records of prohibited gun purchasers into the Brady background check system. We need to take this opportunity to close that dreadful records gap. As Virginia Tech showed us, lives literally are at stake.