An ambitious plan by Maryland to catalog the “fingerprint” of every gun sold in the state -- making dealers fire a shot and send in the spent casing -- is being scrapped, literally. 
 
 State authorities have conceded that the bullet ID program, enacted in 2000, cost $5 million, was plagued by technical problems and did not solve a single crime. Now, the 300,000 shell casings, one from every handgun sold in the state since the law took effect, will now be sold for scrap metal. 
 
 "Obviously, I'm disappointed," former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, whose administration pushed for the database, told the Baltimore Sun. "It's a little unfortunate, in that logic and common sense suggest that it would be a good crime-fighting tool." 
 
 But Second Amendment advocates say the program was doomed to fail. 
 
 “It was clear 10 years ago that this program was not going to work,” John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center told FoxNews.com. "Millions were spent on funding this program, money that could have been better used for actual police and law-enforcement resources.” 
 
 “It was clear ten years ago that this program was not going to work.” - John Lott, Crime Prevention Research Center 
 
 Lott even predicted that the program would fail over a decade ago in an op-ed piece in the National Review in February 2005. Even though the state spent approximately $60 per gun to catalog each firearm's unique ballistic signature, critics, including Lott, said legally purchased guns were typically not the ones wielded by criminals. They also said the program suffered from widespread erroneous entry of data and the inadequate software often resulted in hundreds of "matches" being found for each casing tested. 
 
 According to the Baltimore Sun, the hundreds of thousands of “fingerprinted” casings were stored in envelopes kept in boxes inside an old fallout shelter beneath the Maryland State Police headquarters in the Baltimore suburb of Pikesville, filling three massive rooms, each secured by a combination lock. Each shell was stamped with a barcode and then photographed by forensic scientists to create a database they hoped would yield matches to casings collected at crime scenes. 
 
 Related Image Expand / Contract FILE: Undated: A model 1911 pistol is held in the hands of an assembler at the Smith & Wesson factory in Springfield, Mass. 
 
 “The Maryland ballistics database has been a failure from its inception,” Amy Hunter, spokeswoman for the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action, told FoxNews.com. “The program has been effectively defunct for several years. Funding has been discontinued, and the personnel associated with the program have been reassigned, yet the requirement persisted and its costs were passed on to the consumer. The NRA-ILA supported the repeal and is pleased it’s now in effect.” 
 
 In theory, the “fingerprinting” system is sound science. Scratches are etched onto a casing which enables them to be matched to the weapon that fired the shot. The program was expanded from a limited, but successful National Ballistics database which only collected casings from crime scenes. 
 
 Throughout its run, the Maryland database helped investigators a total of 26 times, but with each case, they already knew which gun was in question, state police officials said. New York had followed Maryland’s lead and created a database of their own, but funding was pulled in 2012 when that program proved ineffective. Some backers say the program could have worked if authorities had stuck with it, claiming that handguns used in crimes are typically as old as 20 years or more. 
 
 In 2008, the Justice Department asked the National Research Council to study the value of creating their own database similar to the one in Maryland and New York, but it was determined that it would not be a good use of funds. 
 
 Perry Chiaramonte is a reporter for FoxNews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @perrych ||||| With a bill, retroactive to show an ending date of October 1, the state of Maryland is ending its program to take ballistic fingerprints of firearms through shell casings after 15 years, $5 million spent, and no crimes solved. 
 
 When passed by Maryland lawmakers and signed into law by Governor Parris N. Glendening (D) in 2000, ballistic fingerprinting was sold to Maryland residents as a way for police to literally use discarded crime scene shell casings to find the gun that had fired them and, thereby, the person who possessed the gun at the time of crime. To accomplish this, Maryland began a process of requiring one spent casing from every new handgun sold in the state to be sent to the Maryland State Police. The theory was that markings on that round would be used to identify the gun should a spent casing with similar markings be found at a crime scene. 
 
 It is estimated that Maryland has approximately 300,000 such casings in an underground bunker waiting to be matched with a shell casing from a crime scene. 
 
 According to The Baltimore Sun, the pursuit of ballistic fingerprinting had already cost Maryland taxpayers $2.4 million by 2004 and a total of $5 million by 2015. Yet, no crimes were ever solved via the ballistic fingerprint requirements. Moreover, “the computerized system designed to sort and match the images never worked as envisioned… [and] in 2007, the state stopped bothering to take the photographs [of casings], though hundreds of thousands more… kept piling up in the fallout shelter.” 
 
 It should be noted that New York also took part in this folly “just a few days after Maryland.” On August 9, 2000, the New York Times reported that Governor George Pataki (R) signed a law requiring “all new handguns… to be test-fired before they are sold, so that the telltale markings they leave on bullets and shell casings can be entered into a state computer database.” Yet, New York did not wait as long as Maryland before ending ballistic fingerprinting. NY lawmakers defunded it in 2012. 
 
 In 2008, firearm examiner C. Rodney James, PhD, warned that the then-newly minted microstamping craze was the just the next step in the gun control evolution of ballistic fingerprinting and one that would prove no more successful. According to the NRA-ILA, James explained that microstamping will fall by the wayside like ballistic fingerprinting for the simple fact that it does not work. 
 
 In fact, James provided numerous reasons why it cannot work. Here are four of the many reasons he provided: 
 
 Barrels, firing pins, slides, bolts and similar parts affecting these marks can easily be replaced or altered. Without a system to “register” gunsmithing work, marks would become impossible to match… Conversion kits for various firearms are available to permit use of a different caliber of ammunition. Currently, these are not classified as “firearms” and are sold via mail… In a California Department of Justice study, 50 fired cases from the Federal Cartridge Corp. were compared. The cartridges had all been fired in the same gun. In microscopic examination by “experts,” 38 percent were missed! When different cartridge makes were added to the mix, still all from the same gun, 62 percent were missed. Obviously, this presents a serious problem with only one fired case or bullet from each gun. 
 
 Yet California has adopted microstamping, a so-called crime fighting tool that has already proven as unreliable as ballistic fingerprinting laws. 
 
 Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. ||||| Millions of dollars later, Maryland has officially decided that its 15-year effort to store and catalog the "fingerprints" of thousands of handguns was a failure. 
 
 Since 2000, the state required that gun manufacturers fire every handgun to be sold here and send the spent bullet casing to authorities. The idea was to build a database of "ballistic fingerprints" to help solve future crimes. 
 
 But the system — plagued by technological problems — never solved a single case. Now the hundreds of thousands of accumulated casings could be sold for scrap. 
 
 "Obviously, I'm disappointed," said former Gov. Parris N. Glendening, a Democrat whose administration pushed for the database to fulfill a campaign promise. "It's a little unfortunate, in that logic and common sense suggest that it would be a good crime-fighting tool." 
 
 The database "was a waste," said Frank Sloane, owner of Pasadena Gun & Pawn in Anne Arundel County. "There's things that they could have done that would have made sense. This didn't make any sense." 
 
 In a old fallout shelter beneath Maryland State Police headquarters in Pikesville, the state has amassed more than 300,000 bullet casings, one from each new handgun sold here since the law took effect. They fill three cavernous rooms secured by a common combination lock. 
 
 Each casing was meticulously stamped with a bar code, sealed in its own envelope and filed in boxes stacked from floor to ceiling. Forensic scientists photographed the casings in hopes the system would someday identify the owner of a gun fired at a crime scene. The system cost an estimated $5 million to set up and operate over the years. 
 
 But the computerized system designed to sort and match the images never worked as envisioned. In 2007, the state stopped bothering to take the photographs, though hundreds of thousands more casings kept piling up in the fallout shelter. 
 
 The ballistic fingerprinting law was repealed effective Oct. 1, ending the requirement that spent casings be sent in. The General Assembly, in repealing the law, authorized the state police to sell off its inventory for scrap. 
 
 The science behind the system is valid. The scratches etched onto a casing can be matched to the gun that fired it, mapping a so-called fingerprint to the gun. The Maryland system was an expanded version of the successful but more limited federal National Integrated Ballistic Information Network started in the 1990s. It catalogs casings only from crime scenes and from guns confiscated by police. Maryland's unwieldy version collected the fingerprint from every single handgun sold in the state. 
 
 Worse, the system Maryland bought created images so imprecise that when an investigator submitted a crime scene casing, the database software would sometimes spit out hundreds of matches. The state sued the manufacturer in 2009 for $1.9 million, settling three years later for $390,000. 
 
 Zach Suber, a supervisor and forensic scientist for the Maryland State Police, says the process "could have been tweaked" to make it more effective. It's still possible, Suber says, that the collection of casings could have greater forensic value in the future. 
 
 That's because, on average, most guns used in crimes were bought nearly 15 years prior, according to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. By the time they end up on the street, they've often been stolen and resold illegally. 
 
 So the oldest ballistic fingerprints in Maryland's collection are just now reaching the age where the guns they identify may be falling into a criminal's hands, Suber said. He said the state police have no immediate plans to turn the collection into scrap metal, as the legislature suggested. 
 
 New York followed Maryland's lead and created a similar database, but that state pulled funding for the project in 2012 when it, too, had no success. 
 
 By then, it had been clear for years that the efforts weren't working. In 2008, the Department of Justice asked the National Research Council to study the value in creating a national ballistics database with fingerprints from every gun. Researchers, after reviewing the Maryland and New York programs, concluded that such an endeavor would be impractical and a waste of money. 
 
 There have been 26 instances in the past 15 years in which Maryland's cache of spent casings helped investigators in some fashion, but in each case investigators already knew the gun for which they were looking, state police said. 
 
 The first case came in 2004, when Prince George's County investigators thought the gun used in a homicide outside a Popeye's restaurant in Oxon Hill was bought by the suspect's girlfriend a month earlier. 
 
 Investigators pulled the casing from the gun the girlfriend purchased and matched it to the crime scene. But the case against Robert Garner relied more on eyewitness statements and other circumstantial evidence that put him at the scene of the shooting. Garner, who was ultimately convicted, had already been arrested and charged by the time investigators tapped into the ballistic fingerprinting database, according to state police records. 
 
 Just last week, Suber said, investigators on three different cases asked for help from the stash of spent casings. Montgomery County detectives thought a particular stolen gun might have been used in a homicide, even though they hadn't found the gun yet. In Baltimore, detectives looking into two separate murders asked for similar help. 
 
 The results aren't in, but in all three cases, investigators already suspected that a certain gun was used. Lawmakers had hoped the database would work the other way, pointing the way to a gun used in a crime. 
 
 By 2004, when Maryland officials calculated an ineffective system had already cost the state $2.4 million, some legislators tried unsuccessfully to repeal the ballistic fingerprinting law. Repeal efforts in 2005 and 2014 also failed. 
 
 "It's probably the best bill I've had," said Sen. Ed Reilly, a Republican from Anne Arundel County, who sponsored the bill that passed this year. He said prior efforts failed because a key committee chairman would not bring it to a vote. 
 
 That chairman, former state Sen. Brian Frosh, a Democrat, is now Maryland's attorney general. His successor as chairman, Sen. Bobby Zirkin, a Democrat, let the bill come up for a vote. 
 
 Frosh said he was open to repealing the law several times during his tenure, most recently in 2013, but he said police argued that the system still had potential. 
 
 "It's fair to look at it after 15 years and see how effective it was," Frosh said. "I don't have a problem abandoning it."
– Since 2000, more than 300,000 bullet casings have piled up in an old fallout shelter in Pikesville, Maryland, the result of an ambitious program launched to catalog the casings in a database, which would then be used to help solve crimes, per the Baltimore Sun. But 15 years and $5 million later, the program has been deemed a failure—not a single crime was said to have been solved with the database's assistance—and the "ballistics fingerprinting" law was repealed on Oct. 1. Parris Glendening, whose administration set up the database while he was governor, is sad to see the demise of his brainchild. "Obviously, I'm disappointed," he tells the Sun. But a local gun-shop owner in Anne Arundel County describes the initiative as "a waste," and gun rights advocate John Lott tells Fox News, "[The] money … could have been better used for actual police and law-enforcement resources." Tech issues plagued the system from the get-go. Gun manufacturers had to fire every new gun made in Maryland, then send the casing to the three-room shelter nestled beneath Maryland State Police headquarters, the Sun notes. Each casing got a unique bar code and its picture taken before it was sealed up in envelopes and filed in boxes. In theory, it should've worked, since casing scratches can be matched back to the originating firearm, but the Maryland program was much larger than a successful federal program it modeled itself after, and the database software was so buggy that the Sun notes it "would sometimes spit out hundreds of matches" for one crime-scene casing. A similar program started in New York in 2000 shut down just two years later, per Breitbart. The Maryland law was brought up for repeal several times over the years, but police kept insisting it had potential—until the latest hearing, when its defenders gave up. The casings will now likely be sold for scrap.