by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
Ding dong! A witch is dead! The anti-gun witch of ballistic imaging passed in Maryland on April 13, with passage of Senate Bill 736, although its body won’t be interred until October, when it will pass from the statutes.
Executive Editor Joseph Tartaro
All of this is dependent on the signature of the Gov. Larry Hogan, who has said he will sign SB 736 into law, but hadn’t done so as this issue went to press.
The sister of Maryland’s infamous ballistic imaging scheme in New York State, called COBIS, is nominally still festering in the state code, but it hasn’t been funded for a few years, and the Empire State Legislature recently put that anti-gun witch out in the cold by clearly defunding it.
Both the Maryland and New York ballistic imaging schemes were launched more than a dozen years ago, as one of those pie-in-the-sky schemes dreamed up by the anti-gunners to magically make criminal misuse of firearms go away. No surprise: both schemes failed to produce the predicted benefit. Both cost the taxpayers of Maryland and New York millions of dollars, and both failed to solve a single crime. I haven’t seen the total bill for Maryland’s ballistic imaging scheme, but do know that New York wasted over $32 million in taxpayer funds on the COBIS scheme without a single crime-fighting benefit. Maryland’s law didn’t solve any crimes either.
The passing of these anti-gun schemes didn’t draw much media attention, and weren’t remarked in the anti-gun organization websites. But that’s not surprising. It took ten years after the Clinton gun and magazine ban sunset for the New York Times to admit that the law which it supported and which was in force for ten years was a failure.
There is some skepticism apparent in the websites of some pro-gun groups in Maryland over the way the measure was killed off without traditional Democrat-Republican arm-wrestling in the General Assembly.
Both houses of the Maryland Assembly in the week before the final vote acted in near unanimity to end the state’s decade-long dysfunctional experience with what was once billed as a crime scene investigative tool.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), trade association of the firearms and ammunition industry, noted in its eulogy for the Maryland law’s passing that the program has been “unsupported by the very state police charged with operating it and had been unfunded for years.”
Still the law deserved to go. NSSF noted that while the taxpayers were off the hook, firearms manufacturers, Maryland’s firearms retailers and law-abiding firearms purchasers continued to bear the costs of this ill-conceived and moribund program for years and will continue to do so until October when the collection of cartridge casings will finally cease.
New York was the only other state to so encumber its state crime lab with unlamented ballistics imaging technology and had already discarded it as a costly failure that never solved a single crime in the Empire State. As TheGunMag reported many months ago, when the COBIS program was first abandoned a couple of years ago, less than half the cartridge cases collected by the State Police had actually been digitized and added to the New York data base.
Ballistics imaging didn’t work and its would-be successor, the sister witch of microstamping is similarly unready for crime labs anywhere anytime soon because it simply is impossible to implement, NSSF noted. The legal battle against microstamping in California on behalf of manufacturers and California’s firearms retailers, but ultimately to benefit the Second Amendment rights of Californians is still being waged. Despite plenty of evidence that microstamping doesn’t work, and can’t work, it is still being hawked by the anti-gunners as a magical solution to gun-related crimes.
Fortunately, still another occult crime-fight witchcraft scheme of the anti-gunners, bar-coding of all individual rounds of ammunition, seems to be dormant at this time.
As NSSF so aptly noted, “legislators in too many states have a tendency to leap before taking a good look. The result in Maryland and New York has been the now-discarded ballistics imaging distraction that law enforcement did not need and did not want. In the end, no one was served. Taxpayers footed the bill for those wasted efforts. In Maryland’s case the costs won’t be recovered by sending uncounted barrels of brass casings for recycling. Call it a lesson learned.”
The implications of the continued pursuit of microstamping are even greater.
To recap the legislative action, on April 11, the Maryland Senate passed SB 736 by a 44-0 vote. Then the complications started. The senate bill had to be released by two different House committees and then pass the Maryland house by midnight April 13, which was the end of the legislative session. Finally, after much work, the bill was voted on at a little after 10 p.m. that night, passing the House by a 135-2 vote.
The National Rifle Association thanked the Maryland bill’s sponsor, Sen. Ed Reilly as well as the sponsor of the House companion bill, Delegate Seth Howard, as well as the Maryland State Rifle and Pistol Association, the Associated Gun Clubs of Baltimore, and Maryland Shall Issue, as well as NSSF, for their hard work and determination getting this bill through the Maryland legislature, as well as all the dedicated NRA members who have supported legislation like SB 736 for years.
Meanwhile, in New York State, Assemblyman Clifford W. Crouch, sponsor of the budget repeal of COBIS, said of its demise:
“This program has very similar theology to that of microstamping. We cannot continue to vote for legislation that proves to be useless and wastes taxpayer dollars. We have to remember that crimes are committed by using illegal firearms, not licensed, registered firearms held by law-abiding citizens.”
Ding dong! At least one anti-gun witch is dead!
