UPC-Bullet-Tagging, Idea Man Column by Robert Schreib Jr in Web Mystery Magazine, Summer 2005

Idea Man

The idea is UPC-Bullet-Tagging.

Why not use nanotechnology to enable the CSI (Crime Scene Investigations) teams of all the police forces in the world to trace a bullet taken from a crime scene, or from the body of a crime victim, back to the specific person who originally purchased the bullet?

Symbol Technologies, Inc. perfected software that enables us to trace any product by tracking it with radio frequency tags, or by scanning its UPC (Universal Product Code) multiple-lined symbol on the product.

So, take the UPC on the sold box of bullets, and put it on microscopic sections of ceramic or stainless steel that are installed inside the very cores of all manufactured bullets during the molten phase of their creation. Pass a universal law requiring everyone to use a major credit card to purchase all bullets. If the purchased bullets are eventually used in a crime, the CSI people can find the shot bullets, apple-core its inner center (the exterior of a bullet from crimes is needed to identify the specific gun barrels by their unique striations), melt the lead core over a electronically-heated sieve to retrieve the UPC-tag, take a picture of it under a microscope, and scan the picture with a conventional UPC-scanner, and then use the Symbols Technology software to trace the identity of whoever purchased the bullets in the first place. (I considered radio frequency tags, but no microchip's circuits could survive being shot in a bullet; however, the UPC-tag should work just fine.)

If this were implemented the world over, it would save the police millions of dollars in investigative costs, and also save countless lives, because everyone would know beforehand that they could not fire any gun in a crime, without it being traced back to them immediately.

That covers it.