Ballistic fingerprinting update
A reader emails that the AP has picked up on the MD ballistic fingerprinting failure that I mentioned earlier:
A law requiring Maryland State Police to collect ballistics information from each handgun sold in the state has not aided a single criminal investigation and should be repealed, a state police report has concluded.
About $2.5 million has been spent on the program so far. Col. Thomas E. Hutchins, the state police superintendent, said he would prefer spending the money on proven crime-fighting techniques.
Maryland was the first state to adopt a ballistic fingerprinting law in April 2000. New York is the only other state to have such a database.
The Maryland law requires gun manufacturers to test-fire handguns and send a spent shell casing from each gun sold in the state to police. The casing’s unique markings are entered into a database for future gun tracing.
“The system really is not doing anything,” Hutchins said. “The guns that we find at crime scenes may not necessarily be the ones sold in Maryland, so there’s nothing to compare it to anyway.”
January 18th, 2005 at 11:17 pm
This is carefully selected quote, I think: “guns that we find at crime scenes may not necessarily be the ones sold in Maryland, so there’s nothing to compare it to” can lead the reader to think “if only other States had ballistic fingerprinting, maybe our investment in BF would have been more successful.”
Perhaps that point has already been made in media reports of this story.