It has been debunked by the California DOJ. If a state as liberal as California admits it's useless as a crime fighting tool, then it's really gotta be bad.
But, debunked or not, our legislators may not know that.
Here's a copy of the email I sent to my reps. Feel free to use it.
Vince
Representative ________,
I recently read about HB277 which was introduced on February 6th. This bill would require all handguns to be equipped with a trigger lock, and all new handguns must be submitted for “ballistic fingerprinting.” I am strongly opposed to this bill as I feel it would be a tremendous waste of taxpayer money. There is substantial evidence that ballistic fingerprinting is not an effective crime fighting tool. In 2001, the California Department of Justice conducted a technical evaluation of the feasibility of a ballistics imaging database for all new handgun sales. The following is the executive summary of that report.
Automated computer matching systems do not provide conclusive results. Rather, a list of potential candidates are presented that must be manually reviewed. When applying this technology to the concept of mass sampling of manufactured firearms, a huge inventory of potential candidates will be generated for manual review. This study indicates that this number of candidate cases will be so large as to be impractical and will likely create complications so great that they cannot be effectively addressed.
The full text of the report can be viewed here -
http://www.nraila.org/media/PDFs/CADOJ_report.pdf
Maryland has spent millions of dollars instituting a ballistic fingerprinting program, and it has yet to be used to solve any crimes. In my opinion, there are many other programs in Pennsylvania that can make better use of millions of dollars.
I hope that you will see the facts the same as I do and oppose this bill when it comes up for discussion or vote.
Thank you for your time,