UC Davis Receives Grants to Study Firearm 'Signatures'

Earlier this month, the University of California at Davis was awarded two grants totaling $2.1 million for the U.S. Department of Justice to build a bullet matching database and study the markings left on bullets once fired.

With the larger of the two grants, researchers will spend $1.4 million to create a database of 10,000 bullets from Northern California crime labs. Researchers plan to study the bullets with a special microscope and then record unique attributes to create a "signature" for each one.

The other grant will provide $700,000 to study the impressions left by breech faces on cartridges. The researchers expect to find variations in the marks left by breach faces of different guns due to differences in the finishing processes, Fred Tulleners, director of the Graduate Program in Forensic Science noted in a UCD news release.

In 2003, a study by the California Department of Justice concluded that the necessary size of the database, lack of maturity in the technology, a lack of convictions produced using similar databases in New York and Maryland, and the existence of more economical means of matching a gun to cartridge casings found at a crime scene militated against the creation of a statewide reference ballistic imaging database.

The federal government does maintain a national ballistics database which state and local law enforcement agencies can use to link ballistics information from two or more crime scenes. However, federal law prohibits the use of information from the national ballistics database to query state ballistics databases, according to the California DOJ report.