I have just received this information from an acquaintance of mine Mr. George Rogero from the Orange County Shooters Organization. He says the numbers are in for the first 5 years of NY State's Combined Ballistic Identification System program (CoBIS) and now we know that 121,853 new handguns were sold in NY State and were registered with the program and that somewhere between 15.5 and 28 Million Dollars was spent by the state to do this. What did we get for our money? No "hits" were made using the original CoBIS system but in the last year, they found a way around the Federal ban of linking NY State's CoBIS program with the Federal National Integrated Ballistic Identification Network (NIBIN) program using a backup tape to provide some results. Using the NIBIN data collected from known crimes, a grand total of two times the system provided a link between a gun used in a crime and the person who owned and bought the gun new in NY. Both cases coincidently came from the same location, Rochester.

We never heard anything about these hits and we must have missed the banner on the capital building in Albany as well as the press releases from NYS Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). Maybe it is because they don't want the information to come out about the "hits" because both of them show that this is and was a waste of time and money. I have sent in Freedom of Information Acts request and have not gotten anything back but the rumor, (that I will correct if I ever find out the truth,) that the first hit was of a shell casing found on the street after a "shots fired" telephone call. No one was hurt but by the time the shell casing found its way through the NIBIN program and by the time a match was found, the statue of limitations had run out on this misdemeanor crime. In the mean time the person who owned the gun had already been in trouble and his handgun had been taken away while his license was being suspended or revoked.

Hit number two, (2,) just happened in December of 2005 again in Rochester using NIBIN data. Again the person was already in trouble, (again according to the rumors,) and his license had been suspended or revoked however the police never went by to pick up the person's gun. When the police, prompted by this latest hit finally went to the suspects home to get the gun when they asked the suspect where he kept the gun, he told them and when the police went to look the gun was gone. When the police told the suspect that the gun was gone all he said was that the gun must have been stolen and he wanted to report a stolen gun.

Total dollars spent: In the NYS budget $4,000,000 a year plus $4,000,000 set up cost equals $28,000,000 or $230 per gun. DCJS claim, $14,700,000 or $121 per gun. State Police Man Hours = 15 people at 2,080 Man Hours per year =31,200 Man Hours per year, 5 years = 156,000 total so far or 1.3 Man Hour per gun.