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 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.