Stephen P. Halbrook

About the author: Stephen P. Halbrook practices law in Virginia and is the author of That Every Man Be Armed and Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms, 1866-1876.

In the aftermath of the fall 2002 Washington, D.C., area sniper shootings, in which ten people were killed, many lawmakers began advocating legislation that would require ballistics testing of all newly manufactured firearms, supposedly to aid law enforcement agencies in tracing guns used at crime scenes. However, the technical problems that still plague ballistic fingerprinting, as well as the fact that the law ignores the millions of firearms already on the streets, ensure that the proposed legislation will do little to reduce crime. Instead, the proposed law would be used as the first step toward creating a national gun...