How traceable are bullets?

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Cops are after criminals. Criminals are normally dumb. The smart ones generally aren't caught.

Cops can often catch a criminal just by asking questions, the criminal will eventually trip up over the lies. Heck, many just confess.

Assuming the average criminal will know to have a couple barrels and to catch his brass from any shootings would actually waste time for the cops - it's a quick check for them, no great loss if they're wrong, jackpot if they're right.

I haven't performed any barrel changes on my guns, I'm willing to be that most people on this board have mostly original barrels.

Still, you DO run into the fact that 1000x rounds out of 1000 new guns have more in common with each other than the first round and the thousandth round out of the same gun.
 
Is it possible to link a bullet to a specific gun, other than simply matching calibers? For instance, from the rifling marks on the bullet?

I'm pretty sure it's not, but wanted to check.

Is there such a thing as a ballistics database in the US or certain states?
Bore markings on bullets are like tire tracks. Out of a small sample of cars, you can often match one to a given set of tracks, as long as not much time has elapsed for the tires to wear enough for the tracks to change. But tire tracks are NOT unique enough to create a national database of tread marks that would allow you to match a given track to a particular car out of 100 million, nor would such a database be useful since a car's tires wear over time and alter the pattern.
 
Assuming the average criminal will know to have a couple barrels and to catch his brass from any shootings would actually waste time for the cops - it's a quick check for them, no great loss if they're wrong, jackpot if they're right.
In moments of free association and mind-wandering, I've often wondered why nobody scatters a handful or three of random range brass at their crime scene. To expand the concept that a .38spl/9mm luger/.380/.357 all spit a similar projectile, what if there was a nice collection of the wrong brass there, and the correct brass removed or still in the revolver.

I really shouldn't let my mind wander down those paths, but sometimes I just can't help it.
 
I also wonder what a really good scrubbing, de-leading, and de-copper treatment would do to ballistics results. Or a good scrubbing with steel wool, or even a few passes of emery paper on a stick.
 
there are ways to get around this tracing.
paper wrapped bullets
accelerator rounds
and i'm sure of a few others.
just have to dig deeper.
 
There seems to be several ways of altering the "rifling" of a bore.

Hence, the whole "rifling mark" thing seems fairly weak to me, in terms of identification.
 
Lead inside of a barrel can be matched to a specific bullet. The bullet lead can be matched with company records of chemical make up.
This sounds like a long, thin stretch, to me.

Think about the market process involved. Bullet lead is not mined or alloyed by the cartridge makers; they buy it from raw-materials suppliers. Since the ideal alloy characteristics for a bullet will fall within some fairly narrow range, the raw-materials people probably have a "bullet lead" catalog item (maybe two or three kinds) that they sell to all the cartridge companies, in the form of very large wire coils. It may be that all the mass-produced ammo comes from only one or two raw-materials suppliers. Same for gilding metal, jacketing copper, and case brass.

Some foreign ammo makers may use different sources, but again, maybe not. And, just for fun, imagine what the receiving inspection process might be at the Wolf ammo plant, and how easy it might be to match a specimen to their records . . . and that's nothing compared to tracing the origin of something like, say a fifty year-old round fired from a Mosin.

There may be a few custom cartridge makers who are so fussy that they use a unique alloy, but those bullets are unlikely to be used in everyday crime.

I don't see any conclusive or useful information coming out of any such analysis.
 
My local LEO, and State Police would know. . . . . . .

...what my spent-bullets and fired-casings look like, in case any of the guns were stolen. Even the brass off a hull of each shot-gun. I have all of these in our safe-deposit box. The last two pistols I bought came with a spent-hull packed in the box. Easy to I.D. marks from firing-pin, breech-face, and rifling. CYOA.
 
Buckshot, slugs, sabot bullets, are pretty much untraceable via the rifling-groove method. Polygonal rifling is nearly untraceable.

http://www.firearmsid.com/

so how traceable are paper patched bullets?

As this guy. :D
r8fp7r.jpg

It was just a few nights ago, on CSI Miami, they took a bunch of tiny, tiny bullet fragments from some victim's body, and scanned them, and a computer put them all together like a jigsaw puzzle, and they got a match . .

Batman did this, too, except he fired the bullets into various bricks, then used the fragmentation pattern to reassemble the original bullet, in order to get a partial fingerprint match. Silly movie stuff.

Starting 2010, there will be many matching characteristics of both firearms and ammo. Micro Stamping of firearm serial numbers on firing pins and bolt/breech faces. lead and other metals in bullets will soon have ID tags in them, the powders used will also have id tags. Shell cases will have NON wipable surfaces to capture finger prints.

Remember all the rave over facial recognition technology being deployed in airports and such? Turns out those expensive computers and cameras are easily defeated by hats and beards. Expect similar results from firearm tracking technology.
 
How traceable are bullets?

Coat the bullet in some teflon.

It'll not pick up any markings from the barrel and the teflon gives it the strength to pass right through a M1 Abrams tank!!
 
I'm a little concerned about the motives of the OP's question.

Also, I think a few of you are watching too much CSI. CSI is a great show and it demonstrates a lot of technology that does really exist, but it is also fiction. Most shooting investigations and even CSI teams have nowhere near the kind of resources to actually solve every murder like they do on the show. I was told by the chief of police for Mikilteo once that one of the worst things in recent history to happen to law enforcement was that show, because it set an unrealistic expectation of what capabilities and resources LEOs actually have, and now everyone expects their loved one's murder to be solved in an hour. The reality is that far more criminals escape than are ever caught, andmost departments have nowhere near the kind of resources and manpower to do what is done on CSI. I'm not trying to call LEOs ineffective, but expecting CSI level mystery solving out of real LEOs is unfair and unrealistic. It's a TV show, and you need to understand that it is fictional.

As for tracing bullets, as it has been said several times, it can be done to a degree, but it is very inaccurate compared to other forms of evidence like DNA or fingerprints. It is exactly like tire tracks as was mentioned above. If you have a dozen suspected cars and there hasn't been much wear to the tires, you'll probably have a match. If you were to take 200 new Glock 19s and try to figure out which bullet came from which gun, you might have some trouble. Now try doing that with 200,000,000 guns. Good luck.
 
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It is possible to tell, to a degree, what kind of gun fired the bullet because many guns have unique rifling characteristics common to that make or model. The same also applies to firing pin/striker indentations in primers. But this does not prove which specific gun fired that bullet.
 
The last two pistols I bought came with a spent-hull packed in the box

As did mine...along with, Im sure, many others here as well. This really means nothing as these casings were reminants of an unaltered, newly fired weapon. Once any relative "alterations" have taken place, weapon specific info (other than caliber identification) goes out the window...to a degree.

In terms of rifling, Im inclined to think that simply swapping out barrels would do the trick if nothing else.

But, I personally have no need or desire to perform such alterations, so...

I can only hope that this thread is meant for posterity only.
 
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Wanted for swap: Barrel for xyz. Will pay postage.

The chemical fingerprinting was debunked because of the size of the batches of lead. Yes, the shell in question matches others in a box from your house, but also thousands if not millions of others.
 
I didn't read this thouroghly but bullets are about like finger prints. You can tell the caliber,bullet type and manufacture. If you have a gun to capre to then you looke for minute differences in the machining of the rifleing which is pretty consistant. The case and primer strike is another analysis.


Jim
 
lead and other metals in bullets will soon have ID tags in them, the powders used will also have id tags. Shell cases will have NON wipable surfaces to capture finger prints.
Is this really true? Please give some reference to back up this claim.
 
Starting 2010, there will be many matching characteristics of both firearms and ammo. Micro Stamping of firearm serial numbers on firing pins and bolt/breech faces. lead and other metals in bullets will soon have ID tags in them, the powders used will also have id tags. Shell cases will have NON wipable surfaces to capture finger prints.

And the tags will all have RFID and GPS and will automatically capture, store and forward your DNA to the nearest UN black helicopter via the Vatican and NWO's Illuminati database which will track and shoot your kitten and puppy AND force you register your firearms on your tax form.

Did I miss anything..........
 
I did read some cool stuff about lifting prints from casings that had been wiped. There was no oil, no conventional finger print, left but they were able to detect a pattern of corrosion. Obviously it was invisible to the naked eye - took special chemistry and lighting to make it show.
 
Based on a task I was assigned a few years back, I assume there is some law in CT concerning police handguns and having a [fired] bullet and expended cartridge from each department handgun on file. There is a water tank maintained by one of the agencies for firearms testing so I took every handgun to the site and shot each one, recovered the brass and bullet, tagged each as needed and now I have a box containing all of that stuff.

What good it will do is questionable. All of the guns are now much older and in various stages of wear. Some have new firing pins, extractors and/or ejectors, and two even have new barrels.

But that just shows that laws are written that may address some nebulous "feel good" response to some perceived problem, but the reality is the law actually accomplishes nothing.
 
Starting 2010, there will be many matching characteristics of both firearms and ammo. Micro Stamping of firearm serial numbers on firing pins and bolt/breech faces. lead and other metals in bullets will soon have ID tags in them, the powders used will also have id tags. Shell cases will have NON wipable surfaces to capture finger prints.

Maybe plan on swapping various parts, deeply cleaning a weapon, using generic/easily available ammo (paid for in cash), destroy all unused ammo (of the same batch used for various deeds), retain all spent casings and wear gloves. Im sure Im missing something here...

Besides, all of this nonsense only matters if one is inclined to use a weapon for unlawful purposes. Outside of that...does it really matter?

Of course, what relatively intelligent criminal would use his/her own personal weapon for any dastardly deeds anyway?

Personally, I do not consider myself of the criminally minded persuasion, so this stuff does not matter much to me.
 
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Maryland's ballistic fingerprinting program is like New York's and both maintain a database of imaged shell casings. The intent of both programs is not to provide evidence for trial, but provide leads to detectives (go talk to this gun buyer becausse the registered shell casing from the database matched a casing recovered at a crime scene).

Both programs have failed, but for political reasons, have not been repealed. I believe Maryland is not processing shell casings anymore bit still requires their collection and the casings are being stored.

California Attorney General Lockyer evaluated ballistic fingerprinting and determined it could not be made to work with current technology. You may read more about that evaluation here.
 
I haven't read every post hear so forgive me if I repeat what has been said before. My uncle was a homicide cop on the Ft Worth PD and later an investigator in the DAs office. I quizzed him all the time about this very thing.

If the bullet is not too deformed it can be traced back to the gun that fired it with a high degree of certainty. There was a show on the Little Big Horn battle and they were able to recover cases from certain rifles and trace where it had been fired. IIRC they also did this with some of the bullets.

When JFK was shot part of identifying oswalds rifle and ammo was by using a Neutron activation test. This lets them compare the lead core to each batch of bullets and at least be able to say this bullet came from this run of ammo.

My uncle said it was very dificult to match bullets with the Lubaloy coating on them. They did not show the rifling very well.

There was 2 people that were driving around Ft Worth and shooting blacks with a shotgun. They were spotted by a prostitute who had hid in some bushes to take a leak. She got the plate number. After they were arrested my uncle was one of the investigators on the case.

The two shooters were from my town (Burleson) and I ran into my uncle at the local gun store. He was buying shotgun ammo from there and the local walmart so they could do the neutron activation test on the buckshot and prove the shooters bought the ammo. The ammo did come from walmart (where else) and was part of the case against the shooters.

Bullets are very traceable to the gun there were fired from. Altering the guns barrel so that they cannot be traced back is also very easy. It can be done in just a few minutes.
 
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