Nano Stamps
Not sure why they need this in the UK where guns are banned but:
Criminals who use firearms may find it much harder to evade justice in future, thanks to an ingenious new bullet tagging technology developed in the UK.
The tiny tags just 30 microns in diameter and invisible to the naked eye are designed to be coated onto gun cartridges. They then attach themselves to the hands or gloves of anyone handling the cartridge and are very difficult to wash off completely.
August 4th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Hell, they’re trying to get your DNA off the cartridges as well.
Oddly, from a gut level, this technique doesn’t automatically trip my “No Way In Hell” meter. It doesn’t require registration and basically the cartridge would ‘fingerprint’ anyone who held it (it wouldn’t prove they’re the one who shot the cartridge though).
So, if you have a pretty recent shooting and some suspects, just like you’d check them for gunpowder, you could check them for those tags too.
Or you could just lock up violent criminals for life and watch crime practically disappear, but that’s too easy.
August 4th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Robb, it does for me. How much will it increase the cost of ammo?
August 4th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Not as much as it will increase the cost when lead is banned as an environmental pollutant. Stock up now, regardless.
August 4th, 2008 at 10:23 am
What about us reloaders? Won’t the tag eventually wear off, or what if we get a “hot” case from buying once fires in bulk? Lots of ifs and maybes to make this a good idea.
August 4th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Vote For David: that’s silly. Replacing one base metal with another (or an alloy) is very different from a scheme which will require different tags for … what?
Each cartridge? Well, that would effectively be a ban, it would be so expensive, plus cross contamination would make it silly.
Each box? Very expensive, you need a separate batch of the tags for each one, you have to apply it at the stage where you box them, you have to put a serial number on each box (for your own sanity) and record all that.
If you do it at a higher level, you don’t gain anything in crime fighting. Oh, I suppose there will have to be a law against selling partial boxes. There would certainly be a “chilling effect” about e.g. lending ammo to someone at a range, consumers trading and selling ammo and things like that.
And then there’s the problem of cross contamination. Very messy at the factory, and the boxes would need air tight seals. These particles are SMALL and would easily migrate. I’m having difficulty envisioning how it would get handled at the factory, but it would require something in the direction of clean rooms for making integrated circuits (“computer chips”), although different.
Still can’t see how you could reliably get rid of the extra tags after you’ve closed the box of ammo they’ve been applied to (e.g. the ones on the outside of the box, the location in which they’ve been applied to the box (I suppose that could be a throwaway), etc.). This is a new thing, I don’t think we’ve ever tried to anything like this before before, especially with an industry that makes 9 billion rounds of ammo per year. Lets start with a baseline of 500 rounds per box, that’s still 18 million boxes, 18 million batches of unique tags per year.
Forget about importing completed ammo, and what about reloading?
This would be insanely expensive. It makes microstamping of brass at the factory look trivial (although that has the same record keeping issues).
This idea needs to be killed off, ideally as the above one was—didn’t help that the people pushing the above version of microstamping had the patent on it, made them look corrupt politically, which helped kill it in e.g. Maryland. Want to take a bet on this idea being patented?
And the guys in the U.K. are certainly in the ivory tower. With the near complete ban on guns, how is the government going to force criminals to buy this special ammo when they can get it from the same sources they smuggled in the guns from? It’s not like the U.K. is going to let them buy it at stores….
– Harold
August 4th, 2008 at 11:00 am
I guess we were all sitting on this one for Monday ๐
August 4th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Rubber gloves…. heard of em?
August 4th, 2008 at 11:59 am
DJK: how do you take off a pair of rubber gloves without getting the tiny particles on your hands? (How long can you wear a pair of gloves? ๐ How are you going to keep the rest of you uncontaminated?
As I said, we don’t do this sort of thing now (as far as I know), we don’t have the techniques or technology developed for it.
To take the examples I know a little bit about, in a chip fabrication “clean room”, the name of the game is to get the least number of particles of any source onto the silicon wafers.
In handling really dangerous stuff, that you can’t afford to let contact your skin (germs, really nasty chemicals), you use things like glove boxes with negative pressure (so a leak goes into the box and out through a filtering system).
I don’t know of anything where you want partial contamination (how this all works to “fight crime!!!”) but e.g. not cross contamination.
One correction on the above posting by me. You don’t need 18 million batches of these tags, you could duplicate for where bullets can be segregated after being fired. Doesn’t help so much with high velocity rifle ammo, and then there are so many essentially identical bullets for .22LR, .223/5.56 NATO, etc. A very large fraction of those boxes will be .22LR … cheap plinking wouldn’t be such any more.
Next step, pellets and BBs!!! And of course knives in the U.K.
August 4th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I didn’t mean to imply I liked the idea, I don’t. The reason it doesn’t scare me from a privacy standpoint is that it’s practically useless and not much different than fingerprints themselves (only in the reverse).
It would be expensive to apply to the casings for sure, but there’d be no need for a registry or anything. You’d find a casing with tag #776,372,829,191,382, find suspects A, B, and C and check them to see if they had that tag stuck to their person. That aspect of it doesn’t bother me.
However, we all know these things won’t be used to solve crime and only used to increase the cost of ammo to the point where $3.25 per .22 is the ‘norm’, hence killing our rights without having to muck with the constitutional aspects of it.
August 4th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
“we all know these things wont be used to solve crime”
Sure it will. We’ll just be the criminals.
August 4th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Well, I’m not in support of the idea, but I do think it will come to pass.
Essentially, the ‘tags’ would be in the form of a coating on the cartridge before it is packaged. It would – most likely – (at most) be three additional steps in manufacturing: prep, paint, dry. The nature of the ‘tags’ would be such that as they dried and bound themselves to the cartridge, they would have a unique pattern, quite like a DNA chain. They wouldn’t need a database or anything like that. When a person touched the cartridge, some of the tag would transfer to the person. The elements of the coating that remained on the cartridge would serve as the “match” to what was found on the person.
Imagine if every round were coated with a type of paint that only showed up under black light. Except that this coating forms a unique pattern when it dries. When some of it is transferred to something else (e.g. the finger that puts it in the magazine), that transfer would move a small portion. The unique pattern that each cartridge would be traceable to any item that it transferred to.
There are, however, some issues. First, making the stuff isn’t cheap, and applying isn’t either. As Harold commented, manufacturers would need a ‘clean room’ because applying nano-anything is hazardous. Worse than asbestos. That’s one of the reasons it would be so hard to ‘wash off’. It would embed itself into the skin. It wouldn’t be good to inhale it. And a mouth-filter paint spray booth wouldn’t cut it.
As an additional point, I would think that some would come off as the weapon is fired. This ‘coming off’ would be discharged into the air. People spending a lot of time at an indoor firing range would become exposed to these airborne nano-particles. Unfortunately, we’d get no sympathy for this type of lung cancer as many in the “Government Health Care” would care less if a bunch of gunnies get the big C from their hobby. (Unless they use that as a reason to ban it…)
Second, it is relatively easily defeated. Rubber gloves (or any other protective material) will largely make it moot. The coating would have to have a relatively high transfer capabilities, but would have to have high ‘stickiness’ abilities too. So it would transfer once, but probably not more than twice. So wearing neoprene gloves that were then carefully removed and disposed would prevent transfer to the person. Not that most criminals would be this careful, but most criminals won’t care about this technology anyways – they probably wouldn’t believe it exists in the first place.
As for reloading, first, see comments about breathing these elements. After that, unless there is a special clause requiring it be re-applied for re-loads, it isn’t going to be a big factor. There are a lot of industries where the major manufacturers have to do things that the home builders don’t. This would have similar exceptions.
The goals, however, would remain a pipe-dream. Solving crimes will still require good police and prosecution work. Having finger prints or even murder weapons do not always result in convictions. (c.f. OJ’s gloves) And even then, with the revolving door prison systems in the UK and US, having another way to prove “who done it” is mostly moot.
August 4th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Harold said: “how do you take off a pair of rubber gloves without getting the tiny particles on your hands?”
It’s pretty easy. EMT’s, nurses, and doctors do it all the time without getting blood (or other pleasant things) on their hands.
Take the cuff of the left glove (on the outside) in the fingers of your right hand, and peel the left glove off. Crumple the left glove in your gloved right hand. Slip the fingers of your left hand under the cuff of the right glove, and peel off the right glove, letting it turn inside out. The right glove forms a ‘bag’ around the left glove, with the contaminated surface of the right glove on the inside. Voila! Everything’s contained!
August 4th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Jake (and _Jon): good points. I wasn’t realizing how sticky these particles would have to be—they’re just doped pollen—for the scheme to work. I was assuming they’d be more mobile—I suffer from allergies—but that’s only until they stick to a surface.
A commentator on Snowflakes in Hell said he was a chemist and that he was pretty sure $10 of stuff from a grocery or hardware store would remove the stuff. I’ve studied some chemistry as well, and I’m sure he’s right, and if it’s indeed sticky, you wouldn’t need to do it in a glove box/hood/plastic bag/whatever to avoid getting contaminated.
Of course, on the streets, “Is this the good stuff”, “Yeah, straight from Russia” / “XYZ who runs a meth lab cleaned it off” etc.
Oh, yeah, say good buy to surplus ammo and that part of the CMP. The US military certainly couldn’t afford this silliness (although note it’s only been proposed by some wild eyed scientists in the U.K. for the U.K.; I’m sure getting grant money is their #1 goal (the U.K. has been really cutting back on support of research for many many years)).
August 4th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
It looks as though somebody in the U.K. reads Neal Stephenson, too (The Diamond Age).
Don’t forget to demand years of testing to find out any possible health hazards asociated with proposed taggants: carcinogenicity? airborne heavy metal particulate levels greater than permissible? allergenicity? threats to people with asthma? The list goes on and on. {wink}
August 4th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Spray-on cosmetic glitter, coming soon to a range near you.
August 5th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
“Youd find a casing with tag #776,372,829,191,382, find suspects A, B, and C and check them to see if they had that tag stuck to their person”
– Well, thanks to DC’s stupidity, they only want revolvers which normally don’t litter the crime scene with empty cartridges. That is if they first didn’t go collect somebody else’s brass from a range to drop there or release some sort of pollen cloud to bury the scene with excess material.
I can see it now, tag pollution.