Ballistics Database Has Too High a Cost

Solving a single murder -- even if the murder could not have been solved by other means -- is surely a modest threshold for The Post's pronouncement that Maryland's ballistics database makes sense ["Bullet Proof," editorial, April 16].

By all means, let's continue with "ballistics imaging" to link multiple shootings (e.g., the D.C. sniper case) or tie a recovered gun to a particular crime. But that's quite different from a database on all guns, or even all new guns. Among the obvious problems: A database is not reliable because ballistics markings change over time; markings can be easily altered; an effective database that covers resales, thefts and existing guns -- in short, the guns used by criminals -- would be too costly; and a database is equivalent to a registry, a slippery slope toward prohibition, which is the acknowledged goal of many anti-gun advocates.

Even the Fraternal Order of Police has concluded that a ballistics database is unwise and unnecessary: "The cost to create and maintain such a system, with such small chances that it would be used to solve a firearms crime, suggests . . . that these are law enforcement dollars best spent elsewhere."

ROBERT A. LEVY

Naples, Fla.

The writer is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.