This is yet another TV police show that erroneously shows that gun registration is used to solve crimes (FBI S8 E4 11 03 25)
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Gun control activists push for registration as a way to solve crime. In theory, if criminals leave registered guns at a crime scene (as happened in this TV segment), they can then be traced back to the perpetrator. But in real life, guns are usually left at the scene of a crime only when the gunmen have been seriously injured or killed. Also, guns used in crimes are rarely registered. In the exceedingly unusual instances that they are, they aren’t registered to the person who committed the crime. However, with both the criminal and crime weapon present at the scene, police can solve these crimes even without registration.
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In a 2001 lawsuit, the Pennsylvania state police could not identify any crimes solved by their registration system from 1901 to 2001, however they did claim that it had “assisted” in a total of four cases, for which they could provide no details.
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In a 2013 deposition for District of Columbia vs. Heller II, the plaintiffs recorded that the Washington, D.C. police chief could not “recall any specific instance where registration records were used to determine who committed a crime, except for possession offenses.”
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During testimony before the Hawaii State Senate in 2000, Honolulu’s police chief stated that he couldn’t find any crimes that had been solved due to registration and licensing. The chief also said that his officers devoted about 50,000 hours to registering and licensing guns each year. This is time that could have been spent on traditional, time-tested law enforcement activities.
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New York and Maryland spent tens of millions of dollars putting together a computer database on all new guns sold in the past 15 years, even recording the ballistic fingerprint of each gun. But even these states, which strongly favor gun control, eventually abolished their systems because they never solved a single crime.
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In 2010, Canada conducted a detailed examination of its program. It found that, from 2003 to 2009, 1,314 out of 4,257 Canadian homicides involved firearms. Of the identified weapons, about three-quarters were not registered. Among registered weapons, the registered owner was rarely the person accused of the homicide. In just 62 cases — only 4.7 percent of all firearm homicides — was the gun registered to the accused, and an unknown number of these homicide cases involve instances of self-defense. But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police failed to identify any cases where registration was integral to solving the crime.
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