usmarine0352_2005
member
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2005
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- 2,796
Good riddance.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-bullet-casings-20151107-story.html
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-bullet-casings-20151107-story.html
Maryland scraps gun "fingerprint" database after 15 failed years
Maryland spent millions on a gun database that solved no crimes.
11/08/15
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. "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."
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.
Worse, the system Maryland bought created images so imprecise that when an investigator submitted a crime scene casing, the database software would sometimes spit out hundreds of matches. The state sued the manufacturer in 2009 for $1.9 million, settling three years later for $390,000.