Re: Er, Huh?
You wrote, "Of course I'm still for test-firing the gun to record its rifle signature, although as you mention it's relatively easy to get around that one." Since this is trivial to evade, why do it?
The government doesn't have an infinite pile of money, so why not spend it on things that actually would be useful, like establishing better best practices for controlling police evidence? An awful lot of the guns used in crimes were purchased from crooked cops who stole them from police evidence rooms. This is the main mechanism by which the same gun gets used in many crimes.
Furthermore, bad and useless laws have a corrosive effect on public respect for the rule of law as a whole. This is a bad place to get into, because re-establishing credibility once its lost is really difficult. Most crimes get solved, for example, because people in the community are willing to talk to the police. Once you lose public respect for the law, you lose the willingness to talk, and then you lose the ability to solve crimes. You can't get credibility until you can solve crimes, and you can't solve crimes without public trust.
