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.

Click here to send me an email about this entry.

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

Last week, a landmark legislative proposal advanced in California. The State Assembly passed a bill requiring new semiautomatic handguns to imprint a code on expended shell casings. A step beyond what we see each week on “CSI,� this “ballistic fingerprinting� solidly ties bullets to guns, allowing police to determine with greater accuracy and speed which gun fired the bullets used in a crime.

If implemented, California would become the first state to require microstamping technology on new semiautomatic handguns. The Denver Post, in an editorial last week, explained why this long-term effort could have a dramatic impact on gun violence in California:

The bill’s sponsor, Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-Los Angeles, said 2,400 homicides are committed each year in California and about 60 percent involve the use of a handgun. About 45 percent of those homicides are never solved because of lack of clues, Feuer said. Because 70 percent of the new handguns sold in California are semi-automatic pistols, the new technology, over time, would be a significant tool for law enforcement in tracing guns used in crime back to their original buyers and in cracking down on “straw buyers” who purchase guns for criminals.

Most people agree that those who commit crimes with firearms should be caught and punished. California’s microstamping bill will assist police investigating gun crimes. That’s in everyone’s interest, and deserves all of our support.