Three Seattle Guys Want to Bar-Code Bullets

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.

Kevin P. Casey

A trio of former Realtors wants all bullets to be coded like beer cans.

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• Steve Mace
• Alan Gottlieb
• John Knickerbocker
• Politics
• Gun Control

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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.

lonstot@seattleweekly.com