The Tracing Center and the Gun Registry

The country's only federal facility that helps police officers trace and solve gun crimes is literally forbidden to use computers to search gun records. A 1986 federal law made it illegal for the Tracing Center to use searchable databases of any kind in what legal scholars have called one of the most just plain dickish laws in history. So instead of solving murders using basic computing tools, the Tracing Centre's roughly 50 employees process over 370,000 requests a year.