According to a recent NRA-ILA release, H7834, the Rhode Island House "Microstamping Ammunition" bill (which would have required that all new pistols sold in the state of Rhode Island be equipped to "Microstamp Ammunition" with every shot fired, has been "... pulled from the agenda of the House Finance Committee."
This essentially sounds the death knell of the legislative bell for this intrusive, expensive and unproven technology in the state of Rhode Island.
We originally reported on this bill on April 20, 2008. As we said then:
This bill came before the House Committee on Judiciary this week, where it will either be passed back to the House for a vote and then advance to the Senate for consideration, or it will 'die in committee'.Apparently Rhode Island voted for Door Number Two: "Die In Committee".
This latter result is much preferred by honest gun owners; criminals, of course, don't care. They won't be using firearms which they purchased under their own name from retailers, so microstamped ammunition left at the scene of a crime will never be traced back to them.
You may recall that we engaged the "Inventor of Microstamping Technology", Mr. Todd Lizotte, in a dialogue about Microstamping earlier this year. We have yet to hear from Mr. Lizotte in response to our May 5, 2008, concerns about Replacement Parts and other consequences of Microstamping Technology.
Rhode Island also introduced bills requiring "Encoded Ammunition" (encoding by the ammunition manufacturer, not by the firearm) as reported here in March 3 and March 4 of 2008. We have no current information about the status of these bills.
The "Encoded Ammunition" technology is completely different from "Microstamping Ammunition" technology.
However, the consequences of passage of either bill would be / would have been the same: an economically unbearable burden on the ownership of firearms; a dramatic increase on either the cost of ammunition or firarms/firearms replacement parts; and legal accountability imposed on the firearm owner with no demonstrable improvement in the notational areas of crime prevention or delivery of tools to the Law Enforcement Community to resolve crimes.
With all due respect to the contributions of Mr. Lizotte, we cannot help rejoicing in the rejection of either of these measures. Lacking any proof of realistic benefits to society of their passage, and deeply appreciative of the Unspoken Consequences to firearms owners, we must conclude that both technology proposals constitute nothing less than a back-door attack on the Second Amendment by economically targeting the purchase or accountability of ammunition in support of results which are dubious, at best.
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