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It’s pretty much just complete non-replicable BS. The claim is that the rifling on gun barrels differs from gun to gun, and that they can examine grooves made i
by foooorsyth 3y ago
It’s pretty much just complete non-replicable BS. The claim is that the rifling on gun barrels differs from gun to gun, and that they can examine grooves made in the bullets by the rifling and compare them to other rounds shot through the same barrel and find a match. It doesn’t stand up to independent scrutiny, and I would imagine that with modern machining the gun to gun differences in rifling on the same mass produced guns are minimal. Perhaps there are differences in fowling in well-used guns, but the notion that they’re gonna match a flattened bullet to a specific barrel is ridiculous. Basically a few kooks across the country wear white coats and claim that they can do this “science” and prosecutions pay them to be expert witnesses. Juries eat it up. It’s really nuts.
The only legitimate analysis they’re doing is ammo brand matching. “Hey, there was a Sellier & Bellot 380 Auto casing at the murder scene. The suspect had S&B 380 in his gun safe. We got him.”
- Modified3019 3y agoThis reminds me of another bit of psudeo-science bullshit, claims that bullet wounds can be matched to close bullet size, like saying someone was hit by a 9mm vs .45 cal vs .40 cal if there is no bullet to recover.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoYou should see the games they play with statistics. Find some 1 in 1000 match. Find another 1 in 1000 match. Claim they're independent, so the chances of both of these are 1 in a million. What they don't say is that there are 5000 things you can test that each have a 1 in 1000 chance, so you should expect to find ~5 at random if you test them all. The 1 in a million chance is if you choose 2 of the 5000 at random, test only those and they both match; not if you systematically run tests that only notify you when they find one of the matches.