Interesting question.. I believe it is down only in the US according to the original-original article. Other countries still solve the crimes at a very high rat

Interesting question.. I believe it is down only in the US according to the original-original article. Other countries still solve the crimes at a very high rate. Second, in US, the ballistics records are not searchable. Federal government is prohibited from creating a national registry and while ATF has some records of guns, esp. from out of business dealers, it is not a searchable database. Third, not every bullet carries a clean indication of the gun which it was fired from. Depending on what stopped the bullet, it makes up for a large amount of guesswork. So, guns make the crime much harder to solve.