Citation

Wei Z, Luo Y, Zhou P, Ji K. J. Forensic Sci. 2021; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, American Society for Testing and Materials, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/1556-4029.14794

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

For firearm identification, foundational validity based on the reproducibility and persistence of characteristic marks must be established. We investigate the fired bullets of five Chinese Norinco QSZ-92 9 × 19 mm pistols over 3000 shots. The first 50 fired bullets are recovered, whereas every 50th fired bullet is recovered from the 51st to 3000th round. As such, 109 bullets are available for each pistol, and totally 545 bullets are introduced into the Evofinder(®) system. A large background database comprising 3000 bullets fired from 1000 registered QSZ92 9 × 19 mm pistols is used as interference. Both on-screen analysis and automatic comparison are performed. The first fired bullets from the five pistols are separately correlated with the database. The results show that although the similarity for known match bullets changes slightly as the shot number increases, the land-engraved area (LEA), groove-engraved area (GEA), and slippage marks can be reproducibly transferred to the fired bullets in consecutive shots. The Evofinder system ranks all known match bullets on the top of the correlation result with the combination of LEA, GEA, and slippage marks.

Language: en

Keywords

automatic correlation; ballistic database; Evofinder®; firearm identification; fired bullets; persistence; reproducibility