[jamese]

John and Sandi,

Sandi Iâ??m sorry I mis-understood your post. I thought you wanted to check on a gun to see if it was possibly stolen.

John, In response to your question:

I would be running the gun through the NCIC system and as you stated just because the gun is listed as stolen in the system, it does not mean that the gun your looking at is the same one.
It requires a lot of research and investigation and frankly most law enforcement officers donâ??t have the base knowledge about luger serial numbers to make a proper determination.

While I believe that public access to query the NCIC system would recover some stolen property; most public queries would send law enforcement on wild goose chases. Not to mention a lot of innocent people would have their property seized for an undetermined amount of time until an investigation could determine the true status of the item.

I can also think of numerous other problems that unscrupulous people would do if they had access to that type of information that I donâ??t want to go into.

While Iâ??m a basic believer that information is meant to be shared or its nothing more than data. Sharing certain data can cause more problems than good can come from it.

Jim