Just the other day I was listening to the news about the beltway sniper and of course, Tom Daschle was out there taking another shot at our freedoms. Note that when I mean our freedoms, I don't include the rights of criminals. Daschle and his ilk are the ones more concerned with the rights of criminals; they want to give convicted felons the right to vote, yet were the very same people who wanted to disqualify absentee ballots cast by our millitary guys overseas.
Instead of concentrating on the problem, which in a nutshell involves bad people, Daschle seized the opportunity to attack legal firearm ownership by honest Americans. His comments about the need for ballistic fingerprinting got a lot of attention from the press, none of whom care to understand what the real problem is, nor the intentions of fringe liberals when they speak about ballistic fingerprinting.
What they mean is that they want fingerprinting as a guise for total gun registration by law abiding citizens so that the same thing can happen to us that recently has happened in Great Britian, Canada and Australia-- gun confiscation.
Did you miss that? If you have only watched the news on the regular channels-- NBC, ABC or CBS-- you might have missed it.
Every day a criminal gets away with using an unregistered gun in a crime. But, there are many times that more crimes are deterred by honest citizens with legally owned firearms in their possession. And in many cases, where guns are outlawed, otherwise honest citizens, who use an illegally owned firearm to protect themselves from a criminal with an illegally owned firearm, find themselves in trouble with the law. All I can say to that is, "Better to be tried by 12 than carried by 6!"
After gun confiscation in those civilized countries, came an alarming increase in violent crime because the criminals knew that their potential victims were now disarmed and completely unable to protect themselves. As a former law enforcement officer and police academy instructor, I know that the criminals do not fear the police, the law, the courts, prison or any thing other than the possibility of confronting an armed victim!
The idea of ballistically fingerprinting firearms purchased by law abiding gun owners is preposterous and far more expensive than any tangible results it would produce. Gun barrels of most weapons are changeable, many in only minutes (yes, revolver barrels can be changed, too, but it takes a little more time!). The fingerprinting makes about as much sense as requiring tire prints of all cars registered in case there is a need for a reference for investigating hit and run accidents, burglaries, etc.
The price of such a program would be staggering. Of course, Daschle and his cronies say, "Even if it only prevents one crime, it's worth the cost." What they fail to mention is that the cost of such an endeavor would pay to keep thousands of prisoners, those convicted of rape, robbery, burglary, murder, child molesting, etc., many of whom are repeat offenders, locked up for their entire sentence instead of early release due to alleged over-crowding.
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