Will Gun Control Take Out the Need For Ballistic Analysts Altogether?

            You hear about it everyday. Whether it is on the news or at your family barbeque: gun control laws. There are pros and cons and both sides can be fought to the death, but do we really know what is right?

[Image found on google.com]

            In today’s society, politics is a touchy subject that we are always told to avoid when first meeting new people. Everyone you talk to will have their own views on politics, and this is one thing that will never change. But I’m not going to be focusing on who is on what side, if any side at all. I want to discuss how gun control laws positively and negatively affect the forensic field, especially ballistic fingerprinting.

            Imagine that you are a ballistic analyst. You get chosen to analyze fired bullets that have been found at the scene of the crime. Let’s say that it’s a homicide. Once the autopsy is completed, you receive the bullets recovered from the victim as well as the ones originally found on scene. You carefully analyze each bullet, use your comparison microscope to look at the bullets side by side, count the grooves, study the striations, and look for any other unique markings that could help identify the type of bullet. Once you figure out what type of bullet it is, you then begin to attempt to match the bullet to a gun. To complete this task, you use the comparison microscope and compare known bullets to your unknown piece of evidence. You continue to analyze, bullet by bullet, and you finally get a match! But you’re not done just yet. Yes, this will tell you what type of gun it was fired from, but how will that help you catch the suspect?

            Whenever someone legally purchases a gun, they have to have a background check done and the gun then has to be registered in that person’s name. This is on record, and law enforcement and authorities have access to this information. This is what every law-abiding citizen does when purchasing a firearm. However, do you think a criminal or someone who plans to commit a crime with a firearm goes through this process? Of course they don’t. They either steal the gun, or they buy it “under the table”. This causes a myriad of problems for you as the ballistic analyst. If the person who committed the crime isn’t registered, you’ll probably never know who truly did it, given the situation, case, and circumstances.

            As of right now, the government is considering banning guns and locking down on gun control. Well, this isn’t exactly the smartest decision. Why? Because criminals don’t abide by the law, and that’s why they’re criminals. They’ll continue to obtain firearms illegally and through the black market. This leaves the law-abiding citizens empty handed. It also leaves ballistics analysts left with absolutely nothing to work with because no one would be able to legally own firearms and how else are you going to be able to narrow down your suspects? It will end up being near impossible.

            I know that criminals will almost always be a problem, but taking away the right to bear arms from law-abiding citizens will not only lessen our safety, but it will make forensic scientists, particularly ballistic analysts, jobs much harder because there will be little to work with. And even though the suspect cannot always be found through the database and not every bullet can be identified or narrowed down to one gun, there are still many cases that have benefited from both the database and bullet identification and analysis. 

Don't know what gun control is? Go here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_control

From a ballistic analyst's point of view: prezi.com/rbe5ykqzixhp/ballistic-analyst-by-brogan/

Shot Through the Heart, and You're to Blame; You Give Ballistics A Good Name

Alexandre Lacassagne, who lived from 1844 to 1921, was an incredibly talented and intelligent man and was considered the founder of the forensic science that is so well known today. He dedicated his whole life to this field of study and was always being called in to help solve crimes being committed because of his massive amount of knowledge. He started out as a surgeon for the army and had taken quite an interest to tattoos while he was in Africa. Lacassagne was also capable of performing autopsies and no one was as thorough as he was. To add to his astonishing achievements, he was the head of the legal medicine department at the University of Lyon, as well as the professor of forensic medicine, as well was one of the top experts in legal medicine around. Lacassagne assisted in solving some of the most horrific and infamous crimes in England. He had also written many textbooks and was very famous criminologist of his time. He was not only the first to analyze bloodstain patterns from an attacked victim; he also took a closer look to a fired bullet and linked it back to a gun that was used in a murder. Needless to say, this is the man who started it all.

[Alexandre Lacassagne (image found on google.com)]

The striations, grooves, and unique markings on a fired bullet were not even considered until Lacassagne pointed them out after finding a bullet in a victim that he was performing an autopsy on. After the bullet was removed from the body and cleaned, Lacassagne carefully examined it. He counted the grooves on the bullet, which was seven, and then he started to look at different types of guns. After closely looking at the inside of the barrels of the guns and noticing the number of number of grooves that each gun produced, he found the type of gun that matched based off of the seven grooves found. They then found the owner of the gun that produced the seven grooves on the fired bullet and later convicted. Although Lacassagne’s observations were simple at the time and rather vague, it got people in the forensics field thinking. This newfound discovery was ground breaking and a pivotal point in forensic science and how far it has come since this astonishing observation by Alexandre Lacassagne.

[Pistol (image found on google.com)]

Without the extraordinary work of Alexandre Lacassagne, forensic science might not be where it is today. Over the years, more and more guns are being made and manufactured, so as a result, ballistic fingerprinting has become much more complex and complicated. On top of this, criminals are known for stealing guns and never registering them in their own name. This makes it relatively easy for them to get away with the crimes they commit unless they are caught on camera or have several witnesses there at the scene.

[Left and Right twists on bullet (image found on google.com)]

Focusing on the analysis of the bullet, there are many things to be taken into consideration. Some of the characteristics would be the striations, the grooves, the landings, the number of grooves, firing pin marks, the type of bullet, and which direction the striations are facing (right, left, straight). Ballistic analysts are trained and skilled on this and can usually identify what kind of bullet it is just by looking at it. Depending on the condition of the fired bullet, identification is sometimes made much more difficult. Once the bullet is analyzed, analysts then try to figure out what type of gun that it could have been fired from. This is usually narrowed down to a small list. Unfortunately, due to criminals not registering the guns in their name, they cannot simply look up the people who own a certain type of gun in a database. This is usually were investigations and cases come to a bit of a stand still until further information is provided. However, they never let this stop them from finding the suspect.

Alexandre Lacassagne's Cadaver Adventure: gizmodo.com/5662454/murder-in-19th-century-france-and-the-birth-of-forensic-science

For more about Lacassagne: www.biomedsearch.com/article/ability-to-doubt-forensic-pioneer/150862799.html


References:

Gizmodo. Website. Accessed 6/19/14. gizmodo.com/5662454/murder-in-19th-century-france-and-the-birth-of-forensic-science

Bio Med Search. Website. Accessed 6/19/14. www.biomedsearch.com/article/ability-to-doubt-forensic-pioneer/150862799.html

Birkbeck. University of London. Accessed on 6/19/14. www.bbk.ac.uk/deviance/biographies/lacassagne.htm

A Crime's Most Popular Accessory

      A typical morning routine would go something like this: your alarm goes off. You press the snooze button about three to four times before it registers in your brain that you have to go to work and participate in the real world in just a matter of hours. You go downstairs to make your coffee, maybe breakfast too, if you feel up to it. While you're drinking your first cup of coffee, you turn on the TV to the morning news. You find yourself noticing that it's always the same kind of stories; just different people, different places, a different day. Most of the headlines either involve politics or crimes. The crimes usually involve either a known or unknown suspect that murdered an innocent person. Most of the time, the victim was shot, and there was no given reason as to why the suspect shot them. This is where forensics comes in and CSI and police do everything they can to solve the crime. But the news never goes into intense detail about forensic evidence; just the basics and they only skim the surface of their findings. Even still, you finish up your coffee and then you precede the routine of getting ready for work because you’re used to hearing about these types of things even though they are so horrific.

[Image found google.com]

     In an article found on the Washington Post's website called, Authorities Search Area Where Kayaker Was Shot and Wounded On Saturday Night, dated back to April 14, 2014 and was written by Arelis Hernandez and Justin Jouvenal. They report on a shooting that took place on Anne Arundel creek. David E. Seafolk-Kopp was kayaking along the creek when a bullet grazed him. After many hours of being in pain in his kayak, he ended up making it back on land to receive medical attention. Fortunately, the shot was not fatal. The authorities that were spoken to after evaluating the crime, they believed that the shot was unintentional due to the bullet being fired from far away. The authorities also observed the wound and he bullet and narrowed it down to a particular pistol but they still had to do analysis and sent it to the lab for further testing.

[Image found on google.com]

     In this case, the bullet and the victim are the only two things they have to base their whole investigation on. This will certainly make things much more complicated given there were no witnesses and no one else around when the shooting occurred. I would start out by searching around the creek with search dogs and looking around for any bullet casings. Once the bullet was narrowed down to a specific type of gun, I would then try and see who has purchased this particular type of gun. However, this has its fair share of limitations. In most cases, guns that are used in crimes are stolen and there are no records of the people owning them. This is a huge reason why most crimes that involve guns are not solved because it’s extremely difficult to track down a criminal when you have no idea who you’re even looking for. 

Want to read the actual article? www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/authorities-search-area-where-kayaker-was-shot-wounded-on-saturday-night/2014/04/14/6cfbde2e-c3f5-11e3-bcec-b71ee10e9bc3_story.html

Do you want to know more about matching up the bullets found on scene to a particular gun? Check out this website: www.exploreforensics.co.uk/how-can-bullet-be-idenitied-from-particular-gun.html


References: 

The Washington Post. Website. 2014. Accessed 6/19/14. www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/authorities-search-area-where-kayaker-was-shot-wounded-on-saturday-night/2014/04/14/6cfbde2e-c3f5-11e3-bcec-b71ee10e9bc3_story.html

Explore Forensics. Website. 2014. Accessed 6/19/14. www.exploreforensics.co.uk/how-can-bullet-be-idenitied-from-particular-gun.html

Bullets Have Fingerprints Too

     Ballistic fingerprinting it a critical technique used in the forensic science field. Everyone knows that each and every individual's fingerprints are unique and no two are the same. This is exactly what it is like for bullets that have been fired from a gun. The definition of ballistic fingerprinting, provided by Free Dictionary, is the "identification of the gun that fired a bullet from an analysis of the unique marks that every gun makes on the bullet it fires and on the shell ejected from it."

[The image (found on google.com) shows the striations on a fired bullet]

     Being able to identify and analyze a bullet after it has been fired is extremely important. Ballistic analysts have to look at the different striations that are left on the fired bullet. When experienced enough, the analysts can recognize and quickly identify what type of bullet it is and the size. After this has been figured out, they then have to decide what type of gun that the bullet was fired from to narrow down what they're looking for. Once they have a narrowed scope, they then go into the details. Based off of striations, scratches, and firing pin markings, ballistic analysts usually can find the exact gun that the bullet was fired from. However, their job is made much harder when the gun used wasn't left at the scene of the crime, and when they do not have a specific set of suspects that they are looking into. To add to the complications, shot shells cannot be analyzed because there are no marks left on them after they have been shot. So essentially, this evidence would be useless if found on the scene.
     One of the very fascinating things about forensics is that all of the different areas in the field tie into one another. Such as, ballistics and bloodstain pattern analysis go hand in hand because if a victim is shot, there will (most likely) be bloodstains left behind to be analyzed and documented. For example, the popular TV show, Dexter, is primarily focused on Dexter being a blood spatter analyst, but they also show all of the other areas of forensics such as the photographer(s), toxicology, and the detectives. As we all know, television shows never accurately depict real life jobs and situations, especially in the forensics field because it's so complex and can be rather complicated. If they were to give all the details of what really went on, the audience could potentially become bored, uninterested, or overwhelmed due to the mass amounts of new information being introduced.
     So, what exactly do ballistic analysts look for when analyzing a bullet, or a gun? How do they know whether the bullet came from one gun, or another? What kind of tests or experiments are done to provide solid and concrete evidence in court? Is ballistic analysis reliable? There are so many questions that the average person has about ballistics, and I'm hoping this blog will help answer some of these and clear up common misconceptions or any misunderstandings about the topic.


Haven't heard of "Dexter"? Check out this website for some background information: www.imdb.com/title/tt0773262/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ql_7 

Want to learn more about ballistics? Check out this peer-reviewed article from ProQuest: search.proquest.com.mutex.gmu.edu/criminaljusticeperiodicals/docview/218392726/F3DF8D903814483BPQ/2?accountid=14541

Not enough? Here's more information on ballistics:
www.exploreforensics.co.uk/ballistics-theuse-and-study-of-firearms.html

References: 
The Free Dictionary. Website. 2014. Accessed 6/19/14. www.thefreedictionary.com/ballistic+fingerprinting