For example if you use a gun to kill someone how could the bullet possibly be linked to you thousands of guns use the same caliber or a knife even though you would feel terrible looking at the knife wouldn’t it make more sense to just clean it and continue to keep the knife in your home so it make sense that your dna is on it? in movies people always feel the need to get rid of the weapons but i think it would make more sense to keep it unless there’s something i’m missing
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A lot of people here talking about guns, because well, guns are what are mainly used for murder in the states. A big part of that is because guns are cleaner and more efficient even from distance. Knives you need to be up close. Unless you are slicing someone’s throat from behind, knives are extremely messy with blood everywhere. If you use a knife to stab someone, you will have to do it multiple times, because a single stab wound might not be fatal. Each of those stab wounds will spurt out blood when the knife comes out. Also, knives are made for slicing for the most part, not stabbing. Buy a big cut of meat and take out a knife and try to stab it. Actually don’t. Because if you do, you will find another bad thing with stabbing which is that since the knife isn’t made for stabbing, it will be hard to get it in. Thanks to the laws of motion, when the knife hits the other person’s body, it’s going to slow down some, but your hand in the stabbing motion will be moving at the same speed, so your hand is going to slide down the knife, and you will almost certainly cut your hand as well. Since you are going to be stabbing the victim multiple times, and you probably aren’t feeling the cuts on your hand due to adrenaline at the time, each time you stab, that cut in your hand from getting sliced by the knife will get deeper. That’s a pretty distinctive mark to look for on a suspect.
Also look at the construction of most knives. It is a metal blade that has two pieces of wood or metal or plastic bolted together on the on to form a handle. You won’t have tools to take that knife handle apart, but investigators will. Even if you wash the knife thoroughly, given all the blood with a stabbing, you will likely still leave some blood down in the handle. How are you going to explain owning a knife with the victim’s blood embedded inside the handle? Especially when you also have a wound on your hand that can only come from stabbing with a knife?
Lastly (since I didn’t see other people mentioning this), knives especially are cheap to replace. Even a high quality chef’s knife is only a couple hundred to replace, but most kitchen knives would be much much cheaper. Even a handgun would only be a few hundred to replace. Is it worth saving a little bit of money to keep evidence that directly ties you to a murder?
The general answer is that if a prosecuter is able to provide the murder weapon as evidence and link that weapon to the accused, that establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The whole point of desposing of the weapon is to prevent law enforcement from finding the murder weapon and connecting it to a suspect. In the specific case of firearms, the barrels of guns today are almost universally rifled. That is to say, they have helical grooves on the inside that make the bullet spin and increase accuracy. It is important to note that manyfacturing processes aren’t perfect, and each weapon will have a slightly different groov pattern even between two weapons of the same maje and model. A fired bullet can be recovered and examined under a microscope. The groov pattern on that bullet can be compared to bullets fired under controlled conditions from candidate murder weapons. If forensic scientists can find a match, they can identify the smoking gun as it were. I don’t know if this happens in real life but there is a trope in movies of a murder disassembling a pistol and tossing the parts in different locations to make it harder for the police to recover it
To “prove” a murder, you classically need 3 things: means, motive, and opportunity. If I can establish that you wanted to kill someone, you were able to kill someone via the means by which they were killed, and you had the opportunity to kill them at the time when the person was killed, then a competent prosecutor can convince most juries out there that you’re the murderer.
Having the murder weapon goes a long way towards establishing “means.” Suppose the victim was killed by a .44 handgun, and you are found in possession of a .44 handgun. If you also wanted the victim dead and you were at the scene of the crime when the murder took place, you’re going to have a mighty hard time convincing a jury that you didn’t do it. However, if the gun was never found, then there’s a lot more reasonable doubt that you were the killer.
I think the simplest answer is that it is harder to link you to a gun found at a crime scene than it is to match a gun in your possession to a crime scene. It’s easier to wipe fingerprints off a gun than it is to wipe the “gun’s fingerprint”.
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