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Module 4 Concept
Module 4 Concept Application: Current Research in Firearm Barrel Pattern Analysis
Part 1:
The main take away I got from this was the ability for NIST to create a database of standards for firearm bullet and shell casing rubber replicas to be compared against crime scene bullets and shell casings. It seems that the research for this project is going well, however they stated that over 200,000 shell cartridges are found at crime scenes every year. If that is the case, is there a way of distinguishing whether a mold for a certain bullet or shell casing from a particular gun is already in the database or are we treating every bullet and shell casing as a new one and getting a mold of it. Even though bullets are considered a firearm’s fingerprint, would we want to hold a database for all of those, as some firearms will have extremely similar marks on the bullets?
Part 2: The main takeaway I had was the idea of getting topography-based scans of the tools and toolmarks. It is quite interesting to see as when topography is mentioned, most will think of maps
of land and the elevation levels. With tools and toolmarks, it’s essentially the same aspect since the tools and toolmarks are going to have elevations and valleys when you look at it microscopically. With the deflection angle measurement, how much of that contributes to the algorithm difference found in the results? Can we get the estimated angle of creation lower than 5 degrees to create a more reliable and confident answer in that the tool used was the one that created that mark?
