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Comment by dangerboysteve | Hacker News Reader

Those same people getting the guns are more and likely removing serial numbers.

Removing serial is a lot harder these days bc the compression of stamping alters the metal and makes it hard, "filing off" does not work. Old guns maybe depending on how it was done, but new ones there is specific regulations (I think pressed to 0.003 inch?) so chemical etching will show different densities.

These days they can even catch over stamping, I heard about some cases using xray to do it. So it's more trouble than it's worth to remove serials on new guns usually. For some reason I hear about almost no instances of peening to hide it, which is probably because you need to know the right size and pressure so it mostly makes sense at scale.

It's funny the number of criminals that run around with literally filed off serials and get themselves literally 10x the time on the gun charge as whatever else they caught for.

You can instead get a shitty gun bc some have badly done serials (speshul wepunz has done this before, but ofc then you have to shoot one lol), you can get an old gun, you can finish an 80% lower. But most criminals just steal or straw buy, or buy smuggled guns (the philippines is notorious for this).

Not true for the new guns either. For example Glock’s serial number is a small metal plate embedded into the polymer.

True, glocks are an exception bc the frames are plastic so they can't serialize them easily other ways. I seen other plastic guns (like hipoints and polymer80s) do the same. There's safeguards against this though, I know there's a place you can cut on a hipoint to find a hidden serial even if they remove the plate. Smith & Wesson actually got sued to add an extra hidden serial to their guns. A bunch of plastiguns have this kind of stuff for exactly this reason.

Glocks have matching serial numbers on the plate, on the slide, and on the barrel. Getting the ones off the hardened steel is very hard to do, and most idiots trying to remove the one from the barrel are going to screw up the action.

Also just scratching the surface smooth is not enough, and most people screw that up. The stamping leaves strain marks in the metal under the surface, and these can be recovered from a completely smoothed surface.

For example https://www.horiba.com/int/science-in-action/raman-breakthro... and https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...

These are just the tip of the iceberg for recovery techniques.

Not arguing with the general point, just to clarify: neither slides nor barrels are regulated and both are not considered as guns (unlike frames). And on top of this barrels are consumables. I think stronger point would be that there is a hidden plates in plastic frames somewhere (i knew that there is one for scanning purposes, but the commenter bellow mentioned that they are serialized as well).

Your forensics buddies, in stereotypical fashion for their industry, are blowing smoke.

The classic trick for removing serial numbers and foil attempts at recovery is to weld over. For guns this gets complicated because you're potentially altering heat treated parts that would need to be re-treated but that's doable. The kind of people who tend to own heat treat ovens tend to be the kind to ask questions but that would cost $$. There are many common and popular guns where the serialized parts are not mechanically significant enough to warrant special heat treating in which case weld away.

>The classic trick for removing serial numbers and foil attempts at recovery is to weld over.

Welded over is trivial to recover the serial numbers. See the refs I posted for example.

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