California Attorney General Bill Lockyer thinks that it won't at all be inconvenient to stamp every bullet with a unique serial number, and then register them to the buyer. Some Democrats, however, think this is a terrific idea, and will solve all of their crime problems.

"It's a good tool to fight gangs and other criminal activity," Lockyer said. [...]

"We think this is a very valid idea that could solve crimes quickly," said Hallye Jordan, a spokeswoman for Lockyer, one of the state's leading Democrats.

"It's something that the cops going to a crime scene involving shooting victims, once they recover the spent cartridge or bullets they can look at it right there," she said. "We have a database where they can put the number right in and then drive to the person's house whose bullets they were."

Gee, doesn't that sound simple. I guess these morons have never heard of the black market, or shoplifting.

I'm not the only one who disagrees on the magical ability of a huge government database of Walmart shoppers to solve crimes. Benjamin thinks it smells a lot like Maryland's failed "ballistic fingerprinting".

Now this is on par with gun-fingerprinting. Maryland has fingerprinted 17,000 handguns since 2001 and hasn't solved a single crime utilizing their database. They have also spent a crapload of money on this mind-bendingly stupid idea.

Maybe this is what tipped him off:

Estimated costs to manufacturers would run a penny or less for each bullet, according to [the Justice Department's Randy] Rossi and Paul Curry, a representative of Ravensforge, a Seattle, Wash.-based company that has developed bullet etching technology.

Just as was the case in "ballistic fingerprinting", pressure to adopt the technology is coming from the very companies that invented it. They are making all sorts of promises, in exchange for a heavy investment in their product. Hell, who wouldn't want to be making a penny on every round sold in California?

But what impact will this have on crime? Are police at a crime scene really supposed to be able to read a serial number off of a heavily fragmented or deformed bullet; and then hope that it was purchased and registered through legal channels?

I'm sorry, but I don't see how this system could possibly work, especially when it could be defeated through simple shoplifting.