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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30272 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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A case fired from a semi-auto is going to have a firing pin strike, extractor/ejector strikes, and possibly extraction markings on the case wall. The article gives a series of images of firing pin strikes, with the implication being that these are unreliable as well. My guess is that if rifling isn't a reliable "fingerprint", then firing pin and extractor/ejector markings aren't going to be either. If the components are in good condition, they're within a very small tolerance range across all copies of the model, and random variations of impact angle, strength, fouling, etc etc are going to swamp any signal derived from one copy to another.

This should be a stupidly easy thing to test as well. Fire off ten rounds each from ten different handguns. Provide a toolmark analyst all hundred cases, numbered randomly, and have him sort out which ones came from the same gun. My assumption has always been that someone actually did this in the past; if they have, I'd be interested in seeing the data.

Would these handguns be different, but identical examples of the same model (e.g. 10 Glock 19s), or completely different models altogether, united only by chambering? Or both?

I was assuming ten Glock 19s, but it would be interesting to see how far out you could push it. The toolmark analyst claim is that these marks can identify specific weapons, not just a class of weapons.

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