Each one brought in for registration and fingerprinting to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Guns would then have to be re-fingerprinted every few hundred rounds or so to compensate for the gradual wear of the barrel as it is used, costing billions more. It addresses nothing if the gun used is stolen, in which case they could only track it so far as its last legal owner; there the trail would go cold. It also fails to address how easy it is to change the rifling pattern by filing the barrel. It also fails to detail what would compel criminals to register and fingerprint their own guns, unless those are some really stupid criminals.
Canadian officials have taken major hits over the gun registration program this past summer, with over half the provinces threatening to no longer even participate or enforce any longer. The program had overrun from the original several million dollars/yr projected to over a billion, with no end is sight. This is to register 6 MILLION guns in Canada, whereas we have 250 million. Can anyone honestly expect the US government to do better?
http://canadaonline.about.com/library/issues/bligunreg.htmhttp://www.cbc.ca/news/features/firearms_act.htmlFurthermore, a 2001 state-funded report released by California state ballistics experts found that computer-matched ballistic fingerprints failed 38-62% of the time. The rate goes up when you use ammo from different manufacturers, so that if the gun is fingerprinted with Remington ammo, the fingerprints may not be caught if the criminal uses Winchester ammo, and so forth.
The money used on setting up and running a gun registration/fingerprinting system would be far, far better spent on improving our police forces, hiring more officers, and providing better training, IMO, as you would see much more return for your money in crimes solved and prevented. Ballistic fingerprinting has nothing to do with NRA-abetted terrorism, as you call it. It simply has too many variables to be successfully implemented. It is the Star Wars Program of gun control: it looks great on paper but falls apart in the real world.