After months of delays, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin took one step closer to implementing a law mandating that gun stores in the state sell firearms equipped with microstamp technology.
In 2022, Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a law that established the process for adopting microstamp technology on firearms sold within the state. The idea of the technology is to have a component within a firearm that leaves a unique imprint on spent shell casings that denotes the make, model, and serial number of the firearm that fired it. This technology would theoretically make it easier for investigators to match shell casings left at a crime scene to a potential suspect.
The 2022 microstamping law comes short of mandating the technology be adopted on all firearms within the state. At least for the time being, Mr. Platkin’s office is tasked with investigating the viability of implementing the microstamping technology and establishing a roster for qualifying firearms.
On Tuesday Mr. Platkin announced the standards and submission process a firearm has to satisfy to be included on the state’s roster of “microstamping-enabled firearms” under the 2022 law. Once firearms are certified for the state’s microstamping-enabled firearms roster, the law requires that all gun stores in the state carry at least one microstamp-enabled firearm for purchase.
These new standards and procedures for submitting a firearm for the roster come months behind schedule. The 2022 bill specifically required the attorney general’s office to have the microstamping regulations ready within 180 days of when it took effect, when Mr. Murphy signed it into law on July 5, 2023.
Though his office is still evaluating the viability of the technology, Mr. Platkin praised its potential positive impact on public safety.
“This amazing yet straightforward technology – imprinting unique identifiers on the firing pin of firearms—will have a profound impact on public safety across the state,” Mr. Platkin said on Tuesday. “Thanks to Governor Murphy, New Jersey is a national leader in innovative approaches to reducing gun violence, and microstamping is the latest example of that. Its adoption will aid our law enforcement officers in swiftly identifying crime guns and holding perpetrators accountable.”
The 2022 law states that once microstamping-enabled firearms are validated and included on the state roster, New Jersey gun stores will be required to carry at least one microstamping-enabled firearm product for retail sales and must order “at least one firearm on the microstamp roster within 21 days” after the sale of their last microstamping-enabled firearm in their inventory.
NTD News reached out to Mr. Platkin’s office for comment but did not receive a response by the time this article was published.
Microstamp Laws Face Hurdles
The New Jersey attorney general is not the only official to see delays in adopting firearm microstamping technology.
The Democrat-majority state legislature in neighboring New York passed its own firearm microstamping law in June of 2022, setting a 180-day timeline to determine the viability of the technology, followed by a one-year timeframe for setting performance requirements for the technology if the technology is deemed viable. The New York law also sets a timeline for fining and criminally penalizing sales of pistols that are not equipped with the technology, but the state has yet to validate the technology to initiate the adoption timeline.
California enacted its own law to implement firearm microstamp technology in 2007. In the decade since implementing its firearm microstamping legislation, the state has yet to approve the sale of a single new handgun that features the technology. Gun stores have continued to sell handgun models that predate the California law.
In March, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, of California’s Southern District, granted a preliminary injunction blocking the California attorney general’s office from blocking sales of new firearm models that do not feature the microstamping technology but otherwise meet the state’s safety requirements.
“The technology effectuating microstamping on a broad scale is simply not technologically feasible and commercially practical,” Judge Carney wrote in his March decision (pdf). “The result of this is that when Californians today buy a handgun at a store, they are largely restricted to models from over sixteen years ago.”
The California attorney general’s office has insisted that the microstamping technology is feasible, but that gun manufacturers have simply boycotted its implementation.
“It is firearm manufacturers’ choice not to comply with the microstamping requirement—and not the requirement itself—that delays the addition of pistols to the Roster with microstamping capability,” the California attorney general’s office argued in an April appeal (pdf) against Judge Carney’s injunction.
Even with the microstamping technology, gun rights groups have argued that determined criminals can easily defeat the technology.
The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) has said the microstamping technology on a firearm could be easily replaced by handtools in under a minute. Noting that most microstamping technology entails a microscopic laser-etching device installed in the firing pin of a gun, the NRA-ILA said a microstamping pin could simply be replaced with an unmarked firing pin.
In addition to acquiring firearms that predate the microstamping technology, or removing that technology on new firearms, the NRA-ILA has also warned that criminals could actually use the technology against criminal investigators.
“Criminals would be incentivized to acquire spent cartridge cases at shooting ranges in order to plant them at crime scenes in an attempt to throw the police off their tracks and confound prosecutors,” the NRA-ILA explained.