Maryland: The Happy Death Of A Bad Idea

By Mike McDaniel

As one might expect, a liberal newspaper is decrying the demise of yet another wasteful, big-government boondoggle. In this case, the death of Maryland’s “ballistic fingerprint” registry. The Baltimore Sun reports:

“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.

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.

‘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.”

It is unsurprising that Glendening wouldn’t have a clue that logic and common sense—to say nothing of actual knowledge of police work and firearm technology—suggest that the registry couldn’t possibly be “a good crime-fighting tool.”

“In a old fallout …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms