Can you tell?

[GunnyUSMC]

There was a police department that ordered Glocks with an "artifact" in the barrels so they could be identified. Just to the department or to the individual cop, I don't recall.

A Beretta primer will have a soft rounded "crater" because the firing pin hole is chamfered to keep the case rim from snagging on a sharp edge as it comes up out of the magazine.
Sig-Sauers are prone to firing pin drag and will have a teardrop shaped indent.
Walther brass will have a perceptible bottleneck, the chambers have a faint step.
But no doubt there are others similar.

Matching cartridge cases from a Beretta 92 or 96 was always challenging. Most often the match was made from the firing pin strike and the ejector mark.

Sigs tend to have a light drag mark. But the markings are not to hard to match up.
Now the S&W M&P marks great. The cut at the bottom of the firing pin aperture, no the breach face leaves a beautiful drag mark.

The Gen5 Glocks have a slight flat spot just before the shear marks
A lot of the Taurus guns are easy to identify.

 

[gun'sRgood]

NIBIN is used to match up shooting. Once matches are made, detectives decide if they need confrontation to help with their investigation or prosecution. At one time I submitted all of my matches to the State Lab, but after three years, they started to get backed up. The last year they accepted all of my NIBIN hits (which was 77) one was not confirmed and one was inconclusive.
After they started letting the detective determine to have the hits confirmed, everyone was.

A forensic scientist using a powerful forensic microscope does the confirmation.
View attachment 1192136
I worked hand in hand with them on several cases.
I got so good at identifying the guns by the markings on cartridge cases that the forensic scientist would consult with me on shootings.

Frek'n Totally Awesome!

 

[gun'sRgood]

I’ll PM you about woodturning so, that we don’t go off topic on the forum.


There are several instances where a NIBIN hit was critical in solving a crime.

One that I found funny was a drug dealer was stopped in a BMW. He was a convicted felon and there was a Glock handgun under the seat. The car didn’t belong to the drug dealer. He said that he had just met the guy that the car belonged to and that the gun was not his.

I test fired the gun the next day and entered the cartridge cases into the system.

I matched it to a shooting, where shots had been fired in front of a house, a few months prior. The shooting was just a shot spotter of rounds being fired at a location. What was funny is that the cartridge cases from the shooting were picked up at the end of the drug dealer’s home driveway.


Very often before going to do a shooting, a shooter in the hood will test fire his gun then drive to the location where he intends on doing the shooting.

Several times we had shot spotter calls, and later have a shooting across town. The two shootings end up matching. The detective find out, or already know that the gang that lives in the shot spotter are is beefing with the gang where the other shooting happened.

Dang! These are fun reads! Thx!

 

[tark]

I don't know if the chamber of the Hi-Point is fluted to slow down the extraction, being a blowback pistol.

A fluted chamber will speed up the extraction. It will also ease extraction. This is important on the HK guns, because there is no "slow initial extraction." The case is violently yanked from the chamber.