Gun identifying system: Flawed, failed experiment

By Bill Conners
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

There are not many things harder for a politician to do than to admit defeat, and that is exactly what the governor and the state legislature need to do right now. At least one of them -- either the governor or that esteemed body -- has to find the intestinal fortitude necessary to pull the plug on a failed experiment called CoBIS.

It has now been three years since Gov. George Pataki offered up the Combine Ballistic Information System (CoBIS) as a partial solution to gun violence. The governor punted the bill to the legislature and they carried it down field and over the goal line. The legislature, I'm sure, reacted out of the fear that doing otherwise would make them vulnerable to the charge that they were soft on crime.

Since 2001, handgun manufacturers have provided the state police with a sample of a shell casing from a bullet discharged from every handgun sold in New York. The theory is that by archiving an electronic image of the shell casing, should the gun be used in a crime and a spent casing is found at the scene, the gun can be traced to its owner. And there you go ... another crime solved.

If a full accounting of CoBIS could be done, and maybe the state comptroller should do exactly that, we would discover that the return on investment has been zero.

There are at least four flaws to that CoBIS theory.

-- The first is that just like a pair of shoes, the gun and the casing from it changes characteristics over time from normal use. It is also possible to intentionally alter the firing chamber and firing pin enough to make the last spent shell casing appear different from the one provided from the manufacturer. This isn't fingerprints or DNA; time and wear does make a difference.

-- The second problem is that most guns used in crimes have already been stolen from the legitimate owner. Simply knowing that a Charter Arms .38-caliber Bulldog sold to John Doe in 2002 was used in the commission of a crime is not likely to bring the perpetrator to justice. Even if by some miracle CoBIS finds a match between the manufacturer's sample and a casing found at the crime scene, finding the original owner isn't going bring law enforcement any closer to catching the perpetrator.

-- The third problem is that a high percentage of the guns used for crime are transported illegally from other states. There is no CoBIS record of those firearms.

-- The fourth, of course, is this: What about the millions of handguns manufactured and sold before the advent of CoBIS?

Spending millions of taxpayer dollars on a system of questionable technical integrity is fiscally irresponsible when so many other needs are not being met.

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