The Importance Of Ballistics

A forensic ballistic expert is a specialist that is trained in the field of collecting and analyzing data that is firearm related. These specialists are experts in their specialized field of physics. It is their job to study spent casings, trajectories, fired bullets, and etc. either at the scene of the crime or in a state of the art laboratory. Just like humans and fingerprints, no firearm produces the same markings as another firearm even of the same make and model. Ballistic fingerprinting and firearm identification take advantage of this fact because each firearm leaves its own unique imprints on a spent casing or bullet. Using similar firearms and comparison microscopes these forensic ballistic experts can measure the degree of rifling in a barrel, pin impression, ejector marks, and etc. to figure out what gun their evidence found at the scene matches up with. Today, with our advanced technology ballistics experts have access to nationwide databases. Ballistics details input into these databases and are accessed by law enforcement agencies all across the country. When someone enters new data, …show more content…
Furthermore a ballistic expert has a little more work to do than just deal with firearms. These experts are often involved in the process of crime scene mapping. These maps that are created are very important because they get used in court cases and police reports.
There are a multitude of different techniques that experts use depending on the situation they are in. The first technique that should always be used is called Gross Differencing. A clear example of this is where a 5.56 round could not have been fired out of a 7.76 rifle. This technique seems kind of obvious but it reduces the range of possibilities and helps investigators move on the next step of their investigation. For how simple it is, it is still very