Three Seattle Guys Want to Bar-Code Bullets Second Amendment junkies hate that idea

Another ammunition/gun cod­ing idea has reared it’s head. This time pur­port­edly by gun enthu­si­asts, who have patented a tech­nique for cod­ing the pro­jec­tiles themselves.

The arti­cle (kudos to the author for show­ing anti-gun bias in the title, maybe that’s some of the “trans­parency” we’re sup­posed to be see­ing now days) goes on to explain that after spend­ing a lot of money, the guys from Seattle couldn’t get any ammu­ni­tion man­u­fac­tur­ers to buy into it.

Well there’s a shock. So in an indus­try where there is a very small profit mar­gin, these three guys want a man­u­fac­turer to increase the costs asso­ci­ated with mak­ing their prod­uct, when their com­peti­tors aren’t going to increase their costs as well. Aside from that, as an ammu­ni­tion buyer, are you going to vol­un­tar­ily enter into defacto firearm reg­is­tra­tion by hav­ing to reg­is­ter the ammu­ni­tion you pur­chase? Or are you going to buy the other brand that doesn’t make you tell Big Brother you are a gun owner?

The police spokesman nailed it on the head — laws to pre­vent gun crime don’t work, because peo­ple who use guns to com­mit crimes don’t fol­low laws. Mandating ammu­ni­tion cod­ing would most def­i­nitely cre­ate a black mar­ket ammu­ni­tion man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try, that half of all gun own­ers know how to do now days any­way, and many are cur­rently doing in order to save money on ammunition.

But cod­ing ammu­ni­tion in this way is an old argu­ment. I remem­ber when rep­re­sen­ta­tives of this com­pany tried to get a police crime lab I worked at to “endorse” the prod­uct. The crime lab of course wasn’t going to do so, and have brochures made up tout­ing “police crime lab endorsed tech­nol­ogy”, when it hasn’t been tried or tested. If they are seri­ous about “bar-coding” the bul­lets, I have seri­ous reser­va­tions about how effec­tive it would be if the pro­jec­tiles hit a hard sur­face, or even dirt.

The idea of cod­ing fired bul­lets with unique marks is a great one. One we should look into. Oh wait, don’t we already have that? Isn’t that what hap­pens when a bul­let is fired and it trav­els down the bar­rel? Isn’t that what hap­pens when a cas­ing is fired, and marked by dif­fer­ent parts of the firearm dis­charg­ing it? Oh darn, I guess this tech­nol­ogy is more of a redun­dancy designed more to make Three Guys from Seattle more money, rather than help out police.

Original story posted here.

Russ Ford might look like a long­haired, gun-control, hip­pie type. And in many ways, he is. Ford and his busi­ness part­ners, Steve Mace and John Knickerbocker, have patented a sys­tem that uses laser tech­nol­ogy to imprint cod­ing on ammu­ni­tion with the hope of mak­ing it eas­ier for cops to track it back to its shooter.

But Ford is not a gun-hating, anti-self-defense (as his oppo­nents call him) activist; he has sev­eral guns that were passed down by his father, and once was an avid hunter. Unloading rounds into paper and clay pigeons at a range is still a favorite hobby. “An armed soci­ety is a polite soci­ety,” Ford says, echo­ing rhetoric favored by Second Amendment devotees.

As a gun lover bent on cre­at­ing a sys­tem for track­ing ammu­ni­tion, Ford is an anom­aly in the firearm advo­cacy world. Says Alan Gottlieb, chair­man of the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, “I’m sure every gun group in the state is opposed to it.”

Ford’s part­ner, Mace, says the idea for cod­ing ammu­ni­tion orig­i­nated when the trio heard the story of a police shoot­ing where two offi­cers fired their weapons, but only one hit the sus­pect. In an inves­ti­ga­tion of the shoot­ing, both offi­cers were put on leave, since there wasn’t an imme­di­ate way to deter­mine which one of them had fired the bullet.

“We finally came up with, ‘Well, why don’t we just put a mark on a bul­let to dis­tin­guish one from the other,’” Mace says.

Ford adds that they also fig­ured bul­lets and cas­ings were more likely to be left behind at a crime scene than a gun. With seri­al­ized ammu­ni­tion, whether by the bul­let or the box, it would be pos­si­ble to at least find out who had orig­i­nally pur­chased the rounds.

Mace and Ford spent four and a half years and about $200,000 secur­ing the patent for their ammu­ni­tion track­ing sys­tem. But once that patent was in place and they had formed a com­pany, the unam­bigu­ously named Ammunition Coding System, to mar­ket the prod­uct, they couldn’t find a man­u­fac­turer will­ing to con­sider stamp­ing their bul­lets. So they focused their efforts on con­vinc­ing law­mak­ers that coded ammu­ni­tion could be a cru­cial crime-solving tool.

To this end, Ammunition Coding hired Briahna Taylor, a lob­by­ist with Gordon, Thomas, Honeywell’s Tacoma-based gov­ern­ment affairs office. With Taylor’s help, they began push­ing for ammu­ni­tion cod­ing leg­is­la­tion on the state level. Taylor quickly launched a Web site, ammunitionaccountability.com, and bills were intro­duced in 12 states, includ­ing Washington.

On Feb. 8, Rep. Al O’Brien, D–Mountlake Terrace, intro­duced a bill in Olympia that would have required all pis­tol ammu­ni­tion man­u­fac­tured or sold in the state to be coded. Had it passed, the Department of Licensing would have been respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing a bul­let data­base. But O’Brien’s bill was a leg­isla­tive long shot, as he intro­duced it after the cut­off to get a hear­ing in the Judiciary Committee. Hence, the bill is, for all intents and pur­poses, dead. (O’Brien did not respond to requests for comment.)

Despite the bill’s fail­ure, the fact that it was intro­duced at all has the Washington State Rifle and Pistol Association ner­vous. The reg­is­tered non­profit, orga­nized under the umbrella of the National Rifle Association, is vehe­mently opposed to such bal­lis­tics cod­ing. The day O’Brien intro­duced his bill, a post went up on the WSRPA Web site telling mem­bers that bal­lis­tics cod­ing would increase the cost of ammu­ni­tion and require a sig­nif­i­cant expan­sion of state bureau­cracy to track ammu­ni­tion. “Don’t expect it to fade away,” the site warns members.

For his part, Ford says the method for mark­ing ammu­ni­tion is fairly cheap—pennies per bul­let. He also points out that mark­ing and track­ing indi­vid­ual prod­ucts is hardly a new phe­nom­e­non. Most beer cans, he notes, have a stamp show­ing where and when they orig­i­nated, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to track if there’s a prob­lem with the con­tents on the con­sumer end.

Yet Gottlieb says the prob­lem with ammu­ni­tion cod­ing is not just the poten­tial increased cost of ammu­ni­tion or the cre­ation of a data­base to track sales, but the fact that a com­pany could get a patent and then pur­sue leg­is­la­tion that, if enacted, would essen­tially give that com­pany a monop­oly on the imple­men­ta­tion of that legislation.

Ford coun­ters that the patent sys­tem is designed to give inven­tors a monop­oly for a time to off­set the costs involved in invent­ing their prod­uct. “Some pro­tec­tion is afforded inven­tors every­where that have come up with ideas,” he says.

Mace, Ford, and Knickerbocker met while work­ing for the Seattle-based real estate mogul Martin Selig. Discovering a mutual entre­pre­neur­ial spirit, they began tin­ker­ing with ideas, and in 1998, Ford and Knickerbocker applied for a patent on small knobs that could be eas­ily affixed to out­door ledges and benches to pre­vent skate­board­ers from using them for tricks and jumps. The patent came through in 2001, and they formed Ravensforge, a com­pany now owned by Ford’s sister-in-law that dis­trib­utes the under­rated banes of a skater’s existence.

Ford still puts in time at Ravensforge, work­ing in ship­ping and receiv­ing. The com­pany sells between 20,000 and 40,000 units a year, he says. When it’s nice out, more skate­board­ers are apt to tear up edges, and busi­ness spikes. “There’s nobody that prays for less rain than me,” Ford says with a laugh. Capital from Ravensforge, as well as invest­ments from fam­ily and friends, pro­vided the ini­tial cash infu­sion used to con­ceive the ammu­ni­tion cod­ing system.

Richard O’Neill, pres­i­dent of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, says inci­dents like the police shoot­ing that inspired Ammunition Coding are rare, and he’s doubt­ful it would sig­nif­i­cantly ben­e­fit crime solv­ing. Matching evi­dence at a crime scene to a data­base never goes as smoothly as tele­vi­sion law-enforcement dra­mas would sug­gest, he claims.

“We already find that gun laws don’t do a whole lot there because a lot of your sus­pects aren’t peo­ple who fol­low all the laws,” O’Neill says. He expects the same thing to hap­pen with ammu­ni­tion if seri­al­iza­tion is legally mandated—a new black mar­ket in unreg­is­tered ser­ial num­bers and stolen bullets.

That said, O’Neill con­cedes that if it can be shown that track­ing ammu­ni­tion through bul­let cod­ing does aid in solv­ing crimes, he’d sup­port leg­is­la­tion to require it. “If it helps law enforce­ment catch some bad guys, then I’d be all for it,” he says.

While no cod­ing leg­is­la­tion has passed in any state to date, there is ris­ing inter­est in mak­ing ammu­ni­tion more iden­ti­fi­able. Last October, California passed a law requir­ing all semi­au­to­matic pis­tols to be equipped with pins that stamp the bul­let as it’s fired, cre­at­ing an eas­ily dis­tin­guished link between the ammu­ni­tion and the gun. Federal leg­is­la­tion mir­ror­ing the California law has since been intro­duced; in February, The New York Times edi­to­ri­al­ized in sup­port of efforts to make ammu­ni­tion track­ing eas­ier. Both the California law and the pro­posed fed­eral leg­is­la­tion are adamantly opposed by gun groups.

The debate over ammu­ni­tion cod­ing isn’t fun­da­men­tally about cost or the dif­fi­culty in man­ag­ing a law-enforcement bul­let data­base. It’s about the reach of the Second Amendment, says Gottlieb, who claims bul­let cod­ing is a back­door way to track gun own­er­ship in states like Washington that don’t require gun registration.

“What you have in your own home for self-protection isn’t the government’s busi­ness,” Gottlieb says.

Ford’s response is that law-abiding gun own­ers wouldn’t need to worry about ammu­ni­tion track­ing, since they wouldn’t be com­mit­ting gun-related crimes in the first place. “It isn’t about safe and respon­si­ble firearm own­ers,” he says. “We all real­ize that there are big­ger issues than us involved in this.”

Of course, if leg­is­la­tion is passed requir­ing cod­ing that they alone are in the busi­ness of pro­duc­ing, they stand to make a pretty penny as well.