so ive been watching tv shows were bullets could be traced back to the exact gun used in shooting or crime. How does that work wouldn’t they need the gun that was used tho to track. or could they proceed with just a bullet
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First off, they can’t. The best they can do is say “a gun like this fired the bullet”
There’s a couple of steps involved. Guns fire different kinds of bullets. Some are long, some are short. Some are fat some are skinny. Using the combo of length, width, weight, and a couple of other things they can narrow it down to a few kinds of guns. Its kind of like using a tire to narrow down to a type of car. Different sizes of tires fit on different cars.
Each type of gun has a different style of barrel, most have something called rifling. That’s a set of grooves that spin the bullet so it goes straighter. There’s a different number of grooves, different depth, and different spin for different guns. That can narrow it down even further, either to one gun or a set of guns that use the same barrel.
But like tires this only narrows it down to a range of guns. With modern manufacturing there aren’t enough differences to reliably know which gun fired the bullet. Just like knowing that a car with a Michelin XGV size 75R14 tire narrows it down to a GM car you can’t tell if it was a 64 Skylark. You need additional information that’s not part of the tire to know it was actually a 63 Tempest.
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