Hello, my name is Chris Morales. I’m a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco, California. I’m a board certified specialist in criminal law. Today we’re going to be talking about ballistics, the law of ballistics, which is the law of guns, the law of bullets, projectiles shooting in the air.
It’s really important as a criminal defense attorney to have some knowledge about ballistics because so many of our cases involve guns and shooting and bullets and things of that nature. So, when does the law of ballistics come into play in a case? Usually it’s when there’s a shooting and there have been some bullets recovered at the scene of the crime
and when the police or the authorities or the FBI have recovered a gun and they want to know if that gun fired those bullets. How do they do that? If they are in possession of the gun, what they will do is go to a ballistics expert and have that ballistics expert fire off some test rounds. They’ll put bullets in the gun and fire them off and then save the test bullets.
Then they will extract or get the bullets from the scene of the crime and compare the two and see if they match. How do they know if they match? This is how. When a bullet is fired, it goes through the barrel of the gun. The barrel of the gun has grooves on the inside of it that help the bullet to move in a circular manner to turn as it’s going through the barrel.
And if you’re a gun maker you want the bullet to turn as it’s going through the barrel because the bullet will then fire straighter. It will go in a straight line when it leaves the gun and that’s what you want. And so as the bullet is though going through the barrel of the gun it is scratching the grooves of the inside of the barrel and those scratches are found on the bullet. So when a ballistics expert
is looking under a microscope at the test fired bullets and the bullets that were found at the scene of the crime he or she is looking for striations or scratches that match the test fire bullet and the bullet at the scene of the crime and then they can form an opinion as to whether
the bullets found at the scene of the crime were fired from that gun. So those are some basics about the law of ballistics. If you have any questions about that or if you have a gun in case, please feel free to call me at 415-552-1215. And make sure you follow the Morales Law Firm on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.
The Law of Ballistics
Criminal Defense Attorney – Christopher Morales
Practice Area: The San Francisco Bay Area, California
Call us today for a free consultation (415) 552-1215 (Se Habla Español)
Website: www.sfcriminallawspecialist.com
