Maryland is stopping a good program that identifies guns used in crimes
This sucks balls I was hoping it or something similar would be law here in California soon. I guess the gunnuts will just say look Maryland stopped using it so why would we need it? 
I don't know why anyone would't want to help solve gun crimes it just makes sense doesn't it?
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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.http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-bullet-casings-20151107-story.html
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."
= new reply since forum marked as read
"Feel good" prohibition legislation can get awfully expensive.
And you and your ilk wonder why gun control is a smoking wreck in this country.
Got nothing? Sling out nasty accusations of racism! That's some top-shelf thinkin' there, ace.
A gun can be identified through ballistic fingerprinting assuming they find the gun before much wear has occurred on the moving parts of the gun. The classic example is the cops recovering slugs from a victim's body and finding a gun nearby that was apparently tossed away. The bullets test-fired from the recovered guns will be bullets fired right after the gun was used to kill somebody; the marks from the rifling on the bullets should be identical.
Now if you were to put two thousand rounds through the gun and then checked bullet #2,001 to the slug recovered from the victim, your case is much weaker because of the wear and tear that the rifling has been through.
Barrels can also be manually modified; deliberately damaged by a file to destroy evidence, for example. People who home-gunsmith also do stuff to improve the accuracy of their guns by polishing the rifling using various methods. The example below is called "fire lapping", performed by coating a few dozen bullets in increasingly-fine abrasive powder and shooting them down the barrel.
http://www.ktgunsmith.com/firelapping.htm
And people use other things to scrub copper, lead, and powder residue from the barrels of their guns. Bronze-bristle brushes, fine steel wool, various cleaning chemicals.
I suppose somebody could also soak a barrel in battery acid to modify the ballistic fingerprint.
Finally, the easiest thing to do is simply buy a replacement barrel. Less than $100 gets you a brand-new Glock barrel. Ones for a .45 auto start at about $60.
Same thing goes for "microstamping".
Both systems also require that the person the gun is being registered to is the same as the person pulling the trigger. It depends on a chain of traceability that ends with the shooter. Obviously, this is difficult to achieve!
The system would only work under the following conditions:
The registered owner of the gun was the shooter, the gun was shot very little before being used for murder, and the gun was not modified.
And in those situations, the murder was probably a crime of passion or anger and there was a boatload of other evidence such that a ballistic match was merely a minor bonus.
