Cuomo ruffles NY anti-gunners by urging shutdown of CoBIS
by Joseph P. Tartaro, Executive Editor
New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) has proposed shutting down the state’s 11-year-old Combined Ballistic Identification System (CoBIS) as part of new budget cuts, saying the program has been costly and has helped solve too few crimes.
Some critics of the CoBIS program have claimed that it is a wasteful program that has cost over $44 million since it went into effect on March 1, 2001, and has not been used to solve any crimes.
Cuomo’s proposal would rely instead on the federal NIBIN system, or National Integrated Ballistic Information Network.
But Cuomo, who has been tightening the state’s belt since his election in 2010, may have a hard sell on CoBIS with his fellow Democrats, particularly in the State Assembly, which annually rubber stamps almost any anti-gun measure put before it each year. Announced on Jan. 24, Cuomo’s CoBIS shutdown proposal has already drawn criticism from some lawmakers, as well as support.
Newsday reported that Cuomo’s proposal got cheers from some Republicans who have claimed that CoBIS, is a “waste of time, money and manpower,” but jeers from Democrats—led by Assemblywoman Michelle Schimel (D-Great Neck), a perennial sponsor of “microstamping” legislation. Schimel claimed Cuomo’s proposal was “a step backwards” in fighting crime.
The CoBIS database was originally designed to help identify guns used in crimes by comparing markings on expended casings from crime scenes with shell markings that manufacturers and dealers must send to the State Police for every handgun sold in the state. But it hasn’t been utilized, the governor’s office said.
“Against the ballistic information for thousands of weapons entered into the system since its inception, only a few matches have been made and no associated crimes have been solved,” Morris Peters, a spokesman for the governor’s budget office, said in an email to Newsday.
“Given the frequency of violent crimes being committed with firearms that are either reported stolen or were transported into the state illegally, CoBIS cannot be called an effective crime-fighting tool.”
Republicans applauded the idea. Last year, the GOP-controlled Senate passed a bill to shut the database. Sen. Michael Nozzolio (R-Seneca Falls) said in memo that ballistics studies showed the tracking program was not worth the money or trouble.
“It’s a failure and waste of taxpayers’ money,” added Sen. Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley), co-sponsor of the bill, which died in the Democrat-led Assembly, according to Newsday.
There are admittedly over 300,000 digitized records in the CoBIS system, according to TheGunMag (TGM) sources, but therealso are reports that many of the sample cases submitted to the State Police have never even been digitized for lack of funds and staff.
The New York State Police annual reports reviewed by TGM showed that only two matches were cited as having been made by CoBIS in the 2007 annual report, with no resolution of a single firearms crime, and the same figures were again cited in the 2009 annual report. (No later reports were available.)
Despite the evidence that CoBIS has been costly and ineffective, Schimel told Newsday that the national system is severely limited because it collects data only from weapons found at crime scenes. “With NIBIN,” she said, “you need to find the gun, not just the [spent] cartridge.”
She wants to use the dispute to push for “microstamping” ammunition, which she says is more effective and won’t cost the state because it doesn’t require a database. However, there is no evidence that microstamping, an unproven proprietary technology, would be anymore productive. Several years ago, the California legislature mandated that microstamping begin in January 2010 if the state attorney general certified the technology that is supposed to imprint a unique code on a cartridge when it is fired. So far, microstamping has still not been certified in California.
The New York Assembly has twice passed a microstamping bill, but it was pulled in the state Senate for lack of sufficient votes in 2010, and never left the Senate Codes Committee in 2011.
According to Newsday, Zeldin called the microstamping idea “well-intentioned,” but he opposed it
“Microstamping is an unproven technology that can be easily defeated with household tools” to deface the mechanisms that stamp a cartridge, he said.
For several years, gunowners and firearms dealers in the New York state have been calling for CoBIS to be shut down because of the cost and wastefulness. Dealers who acquire a used handgun, or do not receive a sample cartridge from the manufacturer for both new pistols and revolvers, must travel miles to take them to one of a handful of State Police centers scattered across the state for test firing and certification.
A similar cartridge case database system in Maryland has also received criticism from state police officials, because of its cost and ineffectiveness.
