California Attorney General Bill Lockyer—a leading proponent of so-called ballistic fingerprinting as a gun control mechanism—acknowledged to the California legislature in late January that the technology has technical limitations.

Lockyer had concealed a report, by his own state Department of Justice (CalDOJ) experts, for nearly a year that suggested the technology was not what its loudest supporters claimed in the wake of the “Beltway sniper” investigation. It was in October and early November of last year that the term “ballistic fingerprinting” became buzz words among anti-gunners, eager to place one more restriction on private gun ownership by requiring all firearms sold to be “fingerprinted.” Critics argued at the time that not only did the technology, more accurately known as digital ballistic imaging, not perform as advertised, it was also a smoke screen to establish a de facto gun registry.

While the initial California report finally became public, it was learned that Lockyer had actually gone to Dr. Jan De Kinder, head of the National Institute for Forensic Science’s Ballistics Section in Brussels, Belgium. Critics argue that Lockyer was looking for an expert to refute his own agency’s technicians, but what happened, instead, is that De Kinder virtually verified the initial CalDOJ report.

That report became public almost immediately, in Gun Week and elsewhere.

The initial CalDOJ Bureau of Forensic Services study earned credibility when De Kinder tested fewer than 800 semi-automatic handguns and found the ballistic imaging failure rate—in which cartridge cases were matched with the handguns that fired them—as high as 62.5%. Further, De Kinder reported that the situation gets worse as the amount of data from an increasing number of firearms is entered into the system.

Lockyer reported to the legislature that the high failure rates were unacceptable. He noted that current technology “is not yet adequate to handle the volume associated with adding all new guns to the database and still provide useful information for investigators.” There are some 80,000 handguns sold annually in California, a statistic that would bog down the system. If a larger national universe of new guns were considered, the problems with the system was be increasingly magnified.

Contributing to the calamity is California’s budget crisis, with the Golden State being some $34 billion in the red. There simply is not money for creating and implementing a system that could cost a small fortune and, in De Kinder’s words, “be rendered obsolete in a couple of years.”

Lockyer’s report came as welcome news to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, where NSSF President Doug Painter noted, “(Lockyer’s) report clearly demonstrates that it is impractical to stretch the system beyond its intended use, and that there is a need for additional, scientifically-based research on a range of ballistic imaging issues.”

NSSF has, along with several gun rights organizations, supported legislative proposals in Congress to fund a comprehensive study of ballistic imaging. The study would be done by the National Academy of Sciences.