As I reported in my previous post Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Education Fund to Stop Gun Violence, is now working from home to save money but that didn’t stop him from talking about stuff he didn’t know anything about to the D.C. City Council yesterday:
A gun-control advocate told the D.C. Council’s public safety committee Wednesday that officials should consider adopting a complex method of ballistics tracking to help identify guns used in the city.
“In crime scenes, what we find are cartridges and no guns,” said Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. “Microstamping can provide the link between the gun and cartridge.”
Mr. Horwitz’s comments came during a hearing before the council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary regarding gun laws in the District.
Apparently he didn’t realize one or more of the following facts:
- There are no microstamped guns in production.
- Requiring guns to be microstamped would indirectly be a ban on guns in D.C.
- The Supreme Court said complete gun bans are unconstitutional.
- There are over 200 million guns in the U.S. that are not microstamped and no criminal with room temperature I.Q. would use a microstamped gun. Those with sub room temperature I.Q. will get caught without having a microstamped gun.
- Microstamping is easily defeated:
But we already knew these guys are clueless about guns and microstamping.
P.S. Some gun bloggers erroneously compared the suggested microstamping to Maryland and New York’s “ballistic fingerprint” programs. These are very different things and cannot be directly compared. See my Microstamping research post for details on the differences.
I’m going to disagree. Josh knows all those things. He just doesn’t care. Getting the laws passed are more important to them than it having any actual effect. Because then not only do the people have to deal w/ the hassle of it when it’s there, but we have to use our resources to get it struck down or repealed.