[FreedomCalls]

Hear me out. Has any crime, anywhere, ever been solved by tracing a gun’s serial number? I don’t know of any. In the Hollywood version, a policeman finds a gun near a crime scene, traces the gun, and goes and arrests the person at home. In reality, that never happens, they either have the gun and the perp at the same time or never recover the gun. In the very rare instances where they have a gun and no suspect, a gun trace leads to someone who had their gun stolen or goes nowhere. So I am again: Has any crime, anywhere, ever been solved by tracing a gun’s serial number?

[Myrddin]

My wife is a police/fire/EMS dispatcher. The most common use for a serial number is tracing a stolen weapon when it shows up at a pawn shop or is recovered from a thief in the field. That assumes the owner made the effort to report the loss with the serial number and it was recorded in NCIC for later lookup. A fair number of firearms are recovered and returned to owners who reported them lost or stolen.