15 years ago, Maryland implemented one of those “common sense gun control regulations” that gun-grabbers like “Everytown for Gun Safety” babble about, and that Real Americans warned was going to be a boondoggle and a waste of time and resources better spent on policing.
Every [legally] gun sold in Maryland was test-fired; its spent casing was scanned, bar-coded, and stored away for future reference. There is some valid science to the process – every gun leaves a unique pattern of scratches on its shell casing when it’s extracted, a trait that has led to some crimes being solved (when analyzing the casings of guns used in crimes).
But the process added $60 to the cost of every gun sold in Maryland [legally] over that time.
Maryland just scrapped the program, after spending millions (and extorting millions more from taxpayers), and, as predicted by Real Americans, solving exactly zero crimes:
“The Maryland ballistics database has been a failure from its inception,” Amy Hunter, spokeswoman for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, told FoxNews.com. “The program has been effectively defunct for several years. Funding has been discontinued, and the personnel associated with the program have been reassigned, yet the requirement persisted and its costs were passed on to the consumer. The NRA-ILA supported the repeal and is pleased it’s now in effect.”…Throughout its run, the Maryland database helped investigators a total of 26 times, but with each case, they already knew which gun was in question, state police officials said. New York had followed Maryland’s lead and created a database of their own, but funding was pulled in 2012 when that program proved ineffective.
And doesn’t this sound just like certain gun grabbers in Minnesota to you?:
Some backers say the program could have worked if authorities had stuck with it, claiming that handguns used in crimes are typically as old as 20 years or more.
“If you squeeze civil liberties long enough, eventually you’ll catch a bad guy, probably, we think”
If we just keep “fingerprinting” new guns AND have a National Gun Registry, in 20-30 years we MIGHT start solving crimes committed by people that followed the laws up to that point, i.e. non-professional criminals.
As a bonus, think of all the jobs this will create and the economic multiplier of the government spending.
I’ve always wondered about the science of this. How alike will the sample casing from one of the first dozen firings of a gun be to the casing after a few thousand rounds have been cycled through the gun at the range?
Strange, but how about this “fair play” turnaround?
We need to record every abortion. After all, at some point, an abortion will be botched and a baby will be born and we need to know that abortionists are following the law and treating the baby.
If we did that, given what we know today from the various CMP videos and Kermit Gosnell, we’d find and solve far more crimes than the Maryland law ever did.
Heck, if Pennsylvania had simply done basic due diligence and simply done basic inspections of Gosnell’s abbatoirs, his reign of terror would have ended decades ago.
And it strikes me that the kind of guy who uses his gun as a substitute for a lack of manhood otherwise probably isn’t the guy who’s going to put thousands of rounds through the barrel and chamber. Just sayin’.
Loren, signature would remain the same. Maybe a little worn, but groove pattern will still be the same regardless how many rounds you put through the barrel. But then, barrels are easily interchangeable. It is all a money wasting ruse. [shrug]
It strikes me that as long as they’re using the same machine tool and the same CNC program to finish the barrels, they’re going to have very similar markings each time. Maybe instead of spending a few million bucks, they should have consulted a competent machinist who would have told him that CNC machining tends to be pretty darned repeatable?
You would think, and yet every barrel signature is different. Different enough, like a fingerprint, to make a positive match every time spent bullet is available.