VERN HUMPHREY wrote in a message to ROY J. TELLASON:

RJT>VH> Finally, they extolled this wonderful machine -- and what does this
RJT>VH> miraculous machine do?  Does it automatically compare cases and
RJT>VH> bullets?

RJT>VH> NO!

RJT>VH> All it does is fire the gun as it comes off the assembly line!
RJT>VH> Everything else has to be done manually.

RJT>I almost got the feeling at the end of that bit that the people who were
RJT>pushing this were the people who wanted to sell such machines to
RJT>government all levels...

RJT>It's another money-maker for them,  I guess.

VH> That's exactly right -- "60 Minutes" turned into an informercial
VH> for this machine.  And they gave us the impression that it does a
VH> lot more than it really does.

Of course.

Hey,  let's go invent something,  sell it like that with an issue involved
that has a lot of emotional import to bunches of people (that'll get a
politician's attention quick),  and sell it to the guvamint.  Even if it
doesn't work,  that doesn't matter.  The bureaucracy that results will
never go away,  but it'll keep the folks that get into it out of trouble in
other,  more important areas,  and we'll all make a lotta money.

VH> They never did answer the basic question -- how long would it take
VH> on average to match up a fired case or bullet?

That's because there is no answer to that.  They did point out that the
rough matching was about the best of what the system could do,  and that
final matching would still have to be done by people.

Then there's the fact that there's what,  tens of millions of guns out
there already that haven't been subjected to the process?

I gotta hand it to them for snagging the term "fingerprint" for
this nonsense. The general public _believes_ that no two people have the
same prints.  The only people who would be in a position to know for sure
would be somebody like the FBI,  and they ain't talkin' about it.  But
their choice of this term was a move _designed_ to put the implication into
people's heads that the same thing would hold true in this case -- that no
two of them would be the same, and that the technique would therefore be a
sure-fire way to identify "the bad guys".

Yeah,  right.

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