Daniel P. Sullivan, who is the assistant pistol license officer for Oneida County wrote the following response to the ongoing attempts by New York to make microstamping the law of the state: As an experienced expert on handgun licensing procedures, Sullivan’s observations are the most accurate and honest of any I’ve seen or heard.
“The (proposed) ballistic microstamping law as it relates to pistols (semi-automatic handguns) is a huge waste of money. Some pertinent points need to be made to help non-gun owners understand the existing gun laws throughout the nation so they will hopefully realize I and many other law-abiding gun owners feel this way.
Forty-four states do not require any type of license to purchase or own a handgun. Thirty-one states do not have any prohibition on public open carry of a handgun. By law, all gun owners in New York state must carry concealed in any public format. (Concealed means out of sight; the gun must be covered up).
The application process takes three to four months. The applicant undergoes an extensive background check that includes mental health, domestic and a criminal history check. All of this must be completed before a license to carry a handgun is issued.
New York is one of only three states that has a gun registry specific to both the owner and the gun. Every handgun I own has to be registered to me via my pistol license. If I sell that gun, there is a record of who purchased it from me; 47 states do not have this requirement.
So what is microstamping? It is the ability to have the make, caliber and serial number microstamped on the back of the cartridge (what most people call the bullet) by the firing pin of any semi-automatic handgun sold in New York — not revolvers. The firing pin is about the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen, so this gives you some idea of how small the microstamp is.
The political theory behind this is that any cartridge case (the cartridge case is what is ejected to the ground when any semi-automatic gun is fired) found on the ground at a crime scene can now be traced back to the owner. Sounds fantastic doesn’t it? So why the opposition? How will this affect legal gun owners and criminals?
It will have a great impact on legal gun owners, but virtually no impact whatsoever on criminals. New York would be the only state microstamping semi-automatic handguns (revolvers cannot be microstamped) , and the manufacturers of these guns would simply no longer wish to do business in New York because it would be cost prohibitive to change their whole system for the sake of selling semi-automatic guns here. Last year, gun sales to new pistol license holders in Oneida County alone accounted for taxable sales of approximately $225,000.
This number does not include the thousands of existing license holders that also purchased handguns last year, nor does it include the taxes associated with Internet sales of handguns from or to New York by licensed gun dealers.
The number of pistol license holders in Oneida County alone is nearing 24,000, with more than 1,152,435 statewide. These gun owners make up a large percentage of yearly taxable sales.
Secondly, the firing pin of any semi-automatic handgun can be changed by purchasing a pin from one of the 49 states that would not be microstamping guns or by simply purchasing a pre-existing firing pin in New York that has not been micro stamped.
Representatives from both Glock Manufacturing and Remington Arms have stated that even if all states required microstamping, the ability to remove this technology from the handgun could be done in seconds with a small file by filing the head of the firing pin, rendering this expensive, currently nonexistent and quite intrusive technology obsolete.
Criminals are not purchasing guns legally in New York. They can’t. So even if they are using a gun that they purchased illegally or stole that has a microstamped capability and they fail to change or file the head of the firing pin, the gun will still be traced to the original owner, not them.
Finally, 90 percent-plus of crimes committed with a handgun in New York are committed by people who possessed a gun that was never registered here but brought in illegally because of lax gun laws in other states.
Pistol license holders are not killing people. In my 10 years in the pistol license office, there has been one pistol license holder that committed murder with a handgun: Jiverly Wong of Binghamton was the first. With the vast majority of pistol license holders being middle-class working men and women, what is the political logic of more anti-business, anti-rights, anti-gun laws that will lead to a reduction in sales tax and, quite frankly, do not work?
What is bizarre is that New York has already tried this with its current ballistic testing law that requires all new guns sold in this state to be ballistic tested. Any gun sold new must be fired, and the lead (the actual projectile that exits the gun when fired) and casing has its own unique fingerprint and is sent to the state police in Albany.
The theory behind this legislation when it was passed was that if we find the lead and casing in or near the body of the victim, we can catch the killer.
Tens of thousands of handguns have been tested to the tune of millions of state tax dollars per year. Killers caught? Zero! The law is so bad the state of Maryland repealed it shortly after it was passed. It has been said over and over again that microstamping will not work. It is another example of bad legislation.
Politicians better hope the pistol license holders in Oneida County and throughout the state, the bulk of whom are middle-class taxpaying citizens, do not unite as one voting block.
These law-abiding citizens are sick and tired of legislation that has no effect on criminals, but is one more attempt to prohibit their legal, responsible right to bear arms.