As a guy who worked in an ammo manufacturing plant, this is retarded.
To my knowledge it'd be theoretically possible to put a serial number on the outside of a casing. Ludicrously costly and impractical though, since it'd require every ammo manufactory retool AND result in criminals simply buying unserialized ammo or reloading spent brass picked up from ranges. I'm scratching my head over any sane way to stamp that. You'd probably have to engrave every single round.
Which is aside from the difficulty of tracking serialized ammo. I know people that buy loose, bulk ammo by the barrelful. Good luck tracking where those thousands of 30 cent rounds went.
In terms of serializing inside the casing, is that even possible to do in the first place? And would it even be legible after firing? I doubt it.
It's almost as dumb as the primer-microstamping Cali wants.
On the bottom of the casing, you'd need custom brass stamps made. It'd only he possible to serialize lots. Like each month is a new number. These machines make hundreds of bullets a minute you can't stamp each individual casing a new number. It's bakrupt every ammo manufacturer just to make the new tooling and stamp process
Laser engraving on metal is a thing. It can be very fast, but not quite fast enough to keep up with the machines making the bullets. The bigger problem that this idea faces is the shear number of bullets manufacturers would need to serialize. It would be necessary to have a lengthy serial number composed of alphanumeric characters in order to uniquely serialize every single bullet made by all manufacturers. There would not be enough space on the casing to record such a lengthy serial number. And the databases for recording these serial numbers would be difficult to maintain in a usable and accurate fashion and it still won't track bullets that changed hands after the initial sale. It's a stupid (((idea))).
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