Maryland has announced the discontinuation of one of its firearm laws. Firearms dealers will no longer be required to submit a spent shell casing to the police after they sell a weapon. The spent casing would be used to create a firearm fingerprinting system to prevent crime. The entire system has been a failure and soon will be gone.
The biggest problem the system faced was the sheer quantity of casings coming in, as well as the flawed software used to document them. Over three hundred thousand casings are sitting in a former bomb shelter in Maryland. Most of them have not been scanned since scanning was discontinued in 2007. It makes you wonder why they would keep collecting these casings if they aren’t recording them. The records stopped being kept once they realized that the software being used to document the shells was completely useless. Sometimes when used it would “spit out hundreds of matches” and leave police clueless. The software was so bad that “The state sued the manufacturer in 2009 for $1.9 million” and eventually settled out of court. The entire system was an attempt to copy the federal database that tracks firearms used in crime. The Maryland system tried to document all firearms in the state. It was doomed from the start and never really provided law enforcement with any useful data.
Besides the faulty software and overload of shell casings, the plan was doomed from the start. The idea that a shell casing from a new gun will act as a fingerprint is completely wrong. Yes, firearms do have a ballistic fingerprint, but it is not static like a human fingerprint. The unique engravings made on a shell casing change after use. Especially after the first few hundred rounds. “Normal wear from shooting would inevitably alter the surfaces leaving markings on the brass to such a degree that the original piece of brass would be useless for comparison” making the entire system flawed from the beginning. Also “Greater wear would inevitably cause an enormous number of false positives” as shown by the hundreds of results from police searches on the current system. New York also implemented a similar program to collect shell casings. They have also cut funding for their version of the program too.
Another serious problem with the law is that it required manufacturers to fire a round off from a new gun before sale. This is like driving a car before selling it. The value instantly decreases once it is used. This “Drove the gun collector’s nuts” and was a complete waste. Combine this with the huge surge in firearm sales once the 2013 ban was instituted and you have thousands of pissed off gun collectors buying more guns before a ban takes place, while the state law requires them to be fired and a shell taken. So the weapons then decrease in value and irritate the purchasers even more. The increase in sales also had the effect of flooding the already crowded registry with more casings that needed to be taken care of.
In the end, the system failed because it showed a clear lack of understanding in terms of firearm crime. Most weapons used in crime were “bought nearly 15 years prior” and acquired illegally. So the logic behind collecting new firearm sale casings from legal purchasers is illogical. Even If the firearms are used fifteen years down the road in crime, the ballistics of the weapon will have changed by then. The two million dollar attempt seems to be very far from paying back what was put in.
I noticed that one of the frequent phrases in this post is “flawed from the beginning”, and I do think this points out the core problem in this issue, because if it is born to be doomed, then no easy revision of this system could do any good at all or at least at a level of paying back the effort made to establish these revisions. Thus, obviously, the total cancellation of this law is necessary, especially under the situation that we already have a federal level database and agencies such as FBI and CIA both have adequate ballistic data bases & research labs on demand. However, this does not mean that state level police forces should stop looking at more efficient crime, especially gun crime, investigation tools, since they could never rely solely on the federal assistance.
This is definitely an example of unintended consequences when legislation is not up to snuff. The state did not realize the full implications of collecting a shell casing for every gun sold. In the future, politicians should be more certain that the nation can handle what legislation they are putting forth before passing it. The gun legislation passed in Maryland had good intentions, but the result was less than adequate. Falling to realize the ineffectiveness of this system was a mistake that hopefully will not be repeated. However I do applaud the state legislature for correcting the problem and pulling the plug on a program to help save money and time.