| I've had my issues with Governor Cuomo on some things, but today he came out with something that I completely agree on: getting rid of New York's Combined Ballistic Identification System, or CoBIS.
CoBIS is based on the premise of ballistic "fingerprinting" of bullets. If you've ever seen CSI, you probably know that a bullet fired from a gun receives a distinctive set of marks and scratches on it's way out of the barrel. These markings can be used to match a bullet to the gun that fired it--theoretically, a great way to connect crimes to the weapon that was used in them.
CoBIS, since 2001, has been used to collect a "fingerprint" from every single new handgun sold in New York State, which has then been entered into a massive database to let the police solve crimes by being able to match a bullet to the exact weapon that fired it, even if they don't have the weapon.
Here's the part you don't see on CSI: those distinctive markings change, gradually, as the gun is fired. By the time a gun has been "broken in," it's ballistic fingerprint has been completely changed from what CoBIS has recorded for it, making the database utterly useless. That's why ballistic fingerprinting is only useful in matching a gun to a very recently fired bullet, and it's also why CoBIS has not resulted in the solving of even one single crime in New York in the last 11 years. Nevertheless, New York State has spent $44 million dollars on this project, money that if Cuomo has is way will go elsewhere, and we'll be better off for it. |
