Boondocks No. 58

Alex Ernst's LtE in the Times Union.

This time, taking his hat off from ATV trail lobbying to argue against burn barrels he wrote an interesting LtE in last Thursday's Times Union:

He writes about the problem he faces living in Clarksville with neighboors burning trash:

When I lived rurally in the town of Coeymans, there was no transfer station or town-sponsored pickup service. Some people had no choice but to burn or litter. When I moved to the town of New Scotland into a densely populated hamlet, out of respect for what is really a rural tradition, at first I accepted that my nearby neighbors persisted to burn trash.

But as the years passed, without fail the arrival of open-window weather would routinely coincide with the arrival of the fire urge: My house being downwind from the entire hamlet, it would fill with smoke. Hickory I can abide, but Tide bottles I cannot.

The reality of the dioxin pollution issue is too abstract to most, but people will listen to their senses without argument. If a total ban is resisted, maybe DEC can craft a compromise.

In places like New Scotland with its publicly provided curb-side pickup and transfer station and in thickly settled parts, where there's simply no excuse anymore, it's time to signal the death of the burn barrel with a funeral pyre.

He makes a good point, for those who happen to live in Clarksville or for that matter any of the hamlets where you have neighbors. That's what the original Part 215 law intended to with banning trash burning in villages, cities, and towns with population over 20,000.

The reality is the failure is that of our state to have no political jurisdiction to cover all populated areas where trash burning is inappropriate, versus the vast open spaces that make up the rest of our state, with farms dotting the landscape.

Local laws should be passed in hamlets and local government should decide where people should be allowed to burn and not burn—be it trash, papers, scrap wood, or moldy hay (believe it or not, a be source of complaints for people is about people disposing of hay by burning it to keep their horses from getting sick).

Clearly, there is not an air quality problem from backyard burning in rural areas, especially compared to more urban areas with all those cars and real polluters like those big smokestacks from LaFarge Cement.

I don't see why the state should be getting involved with banning backyard burning, especially when the state already prohibits many kind of burning. If you don't like the current law, go lobby your local government for changing.

Ballistics Database A Waste of Taxpayer Dollars.

It turns out that test firing firearms and collecting sample marks for try to trace bullets to the firearms they belong to not only is an invasion of privacy, it's also a waste of money.

The proposed database would be similar to the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, which is already in use. Run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the database includes ballistic data on about 100,000 guns used in crimes. It has about a 75 percent to 95 percent success rate, the scientists found.

With that kind of success rate, supporters say, creating a database for all guns only makes sense.

"Ballistics testing is only as useful as the number of images in the database," Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., said while pushing for the database in 2002.

Actually, the opposite is true, Wednesday's report said. The larger the database, the more errors the computer will return.

Under the current system, the computer might find 10 possible matches for a single bullet and there's a good chance one of them will be confirmed. After adding more than 1 million guns to the database each year, the same system might produce hundreds of possible matches.

"It's a scale problem," said John Rolph, chairman of the group that completed the study. "If we're talking about using this in criminal investigations, we've got to be able to get something that's practically useful.

..He said alternatives such a microstamping — a technique in which guns are built to leave permanent, unique and traceable marks on ammunition_ are more likely.

The report also questioned the underlying theory behind ballistic imaging. It said the idea that each firearm produces unique marks has not been scientifically proven.

Other variables make the program even more unreliable, the report found. For instance, guns leave different markings on different types of ammunition and the type of ammo used in a crime might not be the same type used during test-firing.

A national database also would not account for the millions of guns already in use. ATF spokesman Robert Browning said the average gun used in a crime is 10 years old. He said the idea of a national database for all handguns needs to be studied more."

That figures. New York's own attempt to enact such a system with handguns has proven to be a complete failure, with it leading to only one match that was dismissed due to being beyond the statue of limitation for a misdemeanor, by the time the state crime lab got around to doing the testing.

NPR also added this to the story:

The panel's verdict? "At this time, it really is not feasible," says John Rolph, who chaired the panel. Rolph is a statistician from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

"We sell between 1 and 2 million handguns in the United States each year. So if you were to enter every single gun, you'd be entering 1 to 2 million every year," he explains.

Rolph says today's technology for comparing images would have a hard time sorting through so many. It would spit out lots of possible matches.

"It never tells you — like on CSI — 'this is a match.' It tells you, 'here's some potential candidates,'" he says.

Getting too many candidates would be a big problem — because to know if a match is real, a forensics expert would have to pull the evidence for closer examination.

"It's OK to have them look at maybe 10 or 20. Do you want them to look at several hundred? … It would be really very difficult to use in a practical way," he says.

So far only two states, New York and Maryland, have set up systems to gather ballistics images from all guns sold or manufactured in those states. Both programs have come under fire from critics who say they cost a lot of money and haven't really helped the police.

"We've watched what's happened in Maryland and New York, and they have sort of test systems. And we've known that while, you know, I think the design was done in good faith, there's some problems in execution," says Joshua Horowitz, executive director of the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence.

Interesting.