Using the actual firearm’s serial number is not cool from a privacy standpoint. In gun buy-backs, anonymity is usually promised to those who turn guns in. It’s something of a broken promise to then turn around and reveal the firearm’s serial number, because the serial number may be present – and linked to the owner’s name – in any number of public and private records.
Admittedly, those records are usually pretty hard to get hold of – they’re usually things like gun-dealer sales records, government gun-registration databases, moving company and pawn-shop records, etc – but the police nonetheless has no business eroding a citizen’s privacy after promising anonymity.
