Smith and Wesson to stop selling handguns in California due to new law that makes it easier to track guns used during criminal activities. Wait, that can't be right.

Courtesy of The Washington Times:  

Smith & Wesson announced it will stop selling its handguns in California rather than manufacture them to comply with the new microstamping law. The other publicly traded firearms manufacturer in the U.S., Sturm, Ruger, also said this month that it will stop new sales to California. 

The announcement late Wednesday came a week after the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for firearms manufacturers, filed suit against California for requiring that all new semi-automatic pistols that are not already on the state’s approved gun roster have the microstamping technology. 

Microstamping is a patented process that, in theory, would have a unique code on the tip of a gun’s firing pin that would engrave that information on the casing when fired. 

Smith & Wesson President and CEO James Debney said, “As our products fall off the roster due to California’s interpretation of the Unsafe Handgun Act, we will continue to work with the NRA and the NSSF to oppose this poorly conceived law which mandates the unproven and unreliable concept of microstamping and makes it impossible for Californians to have access to the best products with the latest innovations.” 

"Poorly conceived law?" A law that makes it easier to track a gun used in a crime back to its owners, is poorly conceived?

Here is what the microstamping does exactly:

Firearm microstamping, or ballistic imprinting, works by engraving a microscoping marking onto the tip of the firing pin. When the gun is fired, it leaves an imprint, usually of a serial number, on the bullet casings. The telltale mark theoretically allows law enforcement investigators to trace the bullet to the registered gun owner.

Here is how the NRA is responding to the new law:  

"This is the latest attempt to undermine the Second Amendment in California by politicians with little to no knowledge of firearms, who seek to impose their liberal values upon those who choose to protect their families with the constitutional right to own a handgun," said Chuck Michel, West Coast Counsel for the National Rifle Association, an Adjunct Professor at Chapman University and author of the book "California Gun Laws."

Color me confused but I am not sure exactly how this negatively impacts the purchase of handguns by law abiding citizens. 

Any of us who have watched a few episodes of CSI, or Dexter, or Law and Order, all know that traditionally bullets can be tied back to the guns that fired them through ballistic tests, during which an expert fires a bullet from a gun and then compares the striations on the side of that bullet to the ones found at a crime scene to see it they are a match.

This technology would dramatically reduce the complexities of that kind of work, and allow law enforcement to simply type the microstamp into a computer and immediately locate the person who purchased the gun. Think of how many police man hours could be saved, and how many more crimes could be solved with that technology on hand.

So knowing that, how exactly does the NRA, and Smith and Wesson, come out against it?