Real life isn’t like Hollywood.
Maryland passed their ballistic fingerprinting system in 2000.
After fifteen years, and after wasting millions of dollars implementing the system, not a single crime was solved using “ballistic fingerprints”.
Not a single crime was solved.
Maryland abandoned the system and the legislature has ordered the mountain of almost a half-million cartridge cases be sold off as scrap metal.
(Baltimore Sun) – Millions of dollars later, Maryland has officially decided that its 15-year effort to store and catalog the “fingerprints” of thousands of handguns was a failure.
Since 2000, the state required that gun manufacturers fire every handgun to be sold here and send the spent bullet casing to authorities. The idea was to build a database of “ballistic fingerprints” to help solve future crimes.
But the system — plagued by technological problems — never solved a single case. Now the hundreds of thousands of accumulated casings could be sold for scrap.
Of course, the ivory tower types thought it was common sense and logical to think the scheme would work. That’s what happens when you’ve spent too much time in academia and politics – and not enough time in the real world. Or if you have an agenda you’re promoting to strip the rights of Americans to protect and defend that which they love.
“Obviously, I’m disappointed,” said former Gov. Parris N. Glendening, a Democrat whose administration pushed for the database to fulfill a campaign promise. “It’s a little unfortunate, in that logic and common sense suggest that it would be a good crime-fighting tool.”
The database “was a waste,” said Frank Sloane, owner of Pasadena Gun & Pawn in Anne Arundel County. “There’s things that they could have done that would have made sense. This didn’t make any sense.“
A study by the U.S. Department of Justice concluded the same thing as Mr. Sloane (at much greater expense):
In 2008, the Department of Justice asked the National Research Council to study the value in creating a national ballistics database with fingerprints from every gun. Researchers, after reviewing the Maryland and New York programs, concluded that such an endeavor would be impractical and a waste of money.
That is perfectly good brass! Don’t sell it as scrap.
It would be far more environmentally conscious to sell it to a reloader.
While I have room for it, is it worth the trouble (and the trash) to pull those cases out of those little envelopes.
If they’ve got 500,000 and you do one each ten seconds, it would take you about 1388 hours to open them all up.
Good work for prisoners, but not for me.
Another failed liberal solution to a problem that exists only in their minds costing the taxpayers millions.