Maryland has officially decided that its 15-year effort to store and catalog the "fingerprints" of thousands of handguns was a failure.
Maryland Scraps Costly Firearm "Ballistic Fingerprinting" Program
Since 2000, the state required that gun manufacturers fire every handgun to be sold there and send the spent bullet casing to authorities. The idea was to build a database of "ballistic fingerprints" to help solve future crimes.
November 12, 2015
Since 2000 Maryland required that gun manufacturers fire every handgun to be sold in the state and send the spent casings to authorities. (Photo: Screenshot from Baltimore Sun video)
Since 2000, the state required that gun manufacturers fire every handgun to be sold there 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, which cost the state millions, was plagued by technological problems, and never solved a single case. Now the hundreds of thousands of accumulated casings could be sold for scrap, the Baltimore Sun reports.
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