Ballistics In Crime Scene Investigation

Ballistics is the scientific study of the dynamics of projectile and bullet trajectory. Crime members utilize equipment that will allow to match individual characteristics to a known object in order to make a comparison. Just like the Locards exchange principle “when two objects come in contact, evidence is always left behind”. When a weapon has been shot, the barrel of the gun will leave marks on the bullet. With the marks left behind, one can scientifically prove the kind of weapon used, trajectory and estimate the distance between criminal and victim.

To begging with, there are a variety of firearms and they all come in different sizes, shapes and different rifling marks. An example of firearms are semiautomatic pistols, according to Young

The first example of a case that was solved using ballistics is the case of Manuel Rojas versus the death of Valentina Giles Rogue. In this case Valentina was roughly twenty years old and she was at her apartment, she had the simple desire for peace and quiet nevertheless there was noise coming from outside her apartment. There were some drug dealers loitering outside her apartment that was located in Santa Ana and because she spoke to them she ended up getting shot in the chest at a close range. Valentina still continued to climb up her stairs with the wound and died in front of her twenty-four year old son and his wife. The Orange County were unable to link the shooter m. In 2009 the investigators of the case asked Edward for help to link the shooter to the scene. With the help of the company's newly developed ballistics analysis system called IBIS BULLETTRAX-3D the investigators were able to links Manuel Rojas to the murder of Valentina (Forensic technology 2016). The second case example is a case where a man fired a gun eight times into the air in North Charleston, South Carolina in March of 2007. The shell casing were collected and entered into National integrated ballistic information network (NIBIN). On July of 2007 a man shot three people in their apartment so there were no eye witnesses and the investigation did not find a gun. Although with the gun shells that were found were then matched to the ones found in March 2007. The man was convicted to the murder because a witness saw whom it was shooting eight shots into the air in March ( Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives