Criminal Code to make it a fel-
ony “to knowingly sell, manu-
facture, purchase, possess, or
carry any semiautomatic hand-
gun manufactured on or after
January 1, 2011, that is not micro-
stamp-ready, or any semiauto-
matic handgun manufactured
on or after that date if the per-
son knows that a microstamping
mechanism has been unlawfully
removed from that handgun.”
March 11, 2010: New Jersey
State Senator Shirley Turner in-
troduces S1700 in the Senate; the
bill is currently in committee.
The measure would mandate
that the only handguns legally
available for sale in the state are
those that are “designed and
equipped with a microscopic ar-
ray of characters that identify the
make, model and serial number
of that handgun. The charac-
ters shall be etched or otherwise
imprinted onto the interior sur-
face or internal working parts
of the handgun in a manner to
ensure their imprinting on each
cartridge case when the hand-
gun is fired.” The law would go
into effect 13 months after being
passed, or four months after “the
Attorney General determines
that the technology necessary to
effectuate the purposes of this
act is… readily available to fire-
arms manufacturers.”
3.
3: Sig Sauer P229, 40 S&W Firing Pin during test firing after 1 round of
ammunition fired.
So-called “microstamping” tech-
nology has been very much in the
public eye in recent years. Pio-
neered by Todd Lizotte and Orest
Ohar as Intentional Firearm Micro-
stamping or IFM (as opposed to the
unintentional and largely random
marks that a firearm’s tooling ac-
tion imparts to a cartridge) in the
1990’s, the technology has been pre-
sented by them and other adherents
as a means of gathering evidence at
crime scenes to help trace the fire-
arm involved in some cases of gun-
related violence.
4.
4: Same as #3, after 1000 rounds fired.
