As posted on Instapundit, the Sacramento Bee has an article about a study commissioned by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer on whether a ballistic-fingerprinting program would actually help identify which guns were used in crimes. The program would require gun manufacturers to test-fire all of their new guns and then send in digital images of the bullets and shell casings to store in an FBI database similar to the one used for fingerprints.
Ballistic fingerprinting received a great deal of buzz after the Washington sniper attacks in October.
Unfortunately, the study seems to conclude that such a program won't actually help identify guns: using a sample database, the commission found that only 38 percent of the bullets they fired were accurately traced back to the gun from which they originated. Lockyer, a proponent of gun control and ballistic fingerprinting, has not released the study to the public, saying that it needs peer review before it becomes a "final report."
The article can be found here.