Here's an interesting question?

[cee-dee]

Stick with the story........ Let us suppose that 70 years ago a man was accidentally shot dead while out shooting Grey squirrels in a large wood with a group of other people.

An inquest decided it was an accident and that one of the group was the unfortunate shooter. There was no charges as it was deemed an accident.

Now, long after the death of the victims wife, some old diaries, notes and papers were read through by an interested party who was shocked to discover that the victims wife had detailed in her notes a few days before her death that she'd got away with killing her husband in revenge after discovering his infidelity.

The family were "of means" and lived on a large estate where "Hunt'n, shoot'n and fish'n" was the norm and they had a large selection of guns. The way the wife had "got away with it" was that she'd taken one of the .22 rifles and fired a bullet in to a water barrel, then taken that bullet and fitted it in to another .22 cartridge case after carefully pulling out its bullet. She'd then loaded one of their old "garden guns" with the doctored round and hid it in the woods.

When the party went squirrel shooting (at the wife' suggestion), she'd taken her own personal rifle and the party guests had taken the other .22 rifles. The garden gun was smooth bore, ie, not rifled. When she used the garden gun to shoot her husband, the fatal bullet was found to be rifled but didn't match the wife's rifle.

Now, 70 years ago, forensics were not as advanced as they are today so the fact that the rifling on the fatal bullet may have been a bit..... er.... scored(???) after being fired again in a smooth bore gun wouldn't have been noticed.

The question is....:-

After all that time, would the revellation result in re-opening the inquest or would the powers-that-be decide that there was no useful purpose in wasting time and effort in doing that as the murderer was long dead as was the person who'd wrongly been identified as the accidental shooter?

[blackburn_stevie]

I don't know the answer to this but, into what do you fire the .22 (of any kind) into a water trap?

I'm askig begause surely there would need to be some kind of "shell" that the water sits in.

I remember I was wrong back in 1975 so it may have happened once more, lol.

[******lynda******]

http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3903&context=jclc

[cee-dee]

Well there you go, all you need to know about constructing your own tank for ballistic tests.

However, for a one-off recovery of a low velocity .22 bullet, a barrel of water will do quite OK.

[******lynda******]

Yes, so long as wise enough to fire vertically, no angle at all, or it could come back at you

[cee-dee]

"Come back at you"? How would it do that? Go'n have a try on some open water and see what angle is needed to "skim" off the water instead of entering  it. It's a shallow angle.....

Heck, it seems that people need a live demonstration before they'll accept anything?

The Sun's 93 million miles away, do I need to go'n measure it?

[joamur_gosof]

heck some people like the coroner of the new inquest might find the live demo handy as well .

My lord the barrel was at a 45 degree angle when it hit D and thus we can plainly show a pellet was in no way affected as it wasn;t fired at all by my client not in test or in her cold blooded murder .I will now move the court to show E,F,G and H were indeed guilty and if A abd B were alive today I would throw the book at them ...and again no pellet would be fired.

[bankhaunter]

I'm wondering how accurate the bullet would be fired for the second time but through a smoothbore barrel.

Can't answer for a bullet but an air rifle pellet propelled by a .22 blank in a smoothbore gun usually missed even large targets in my experience.

[******lynda******]

Not accurate at all. Even fired for the first time. Garden gun range was about 10 yards accuracy. Replace the content of the proper cartridge with a short range .22 , they become wildly inaccurate.

[cee-dee]

A pellet is a pretty inaccurately made, unstable projectile and hardly aerodynamic enough to withstand the pressure from a blank?

I've just checked one (Eley waisted) and they're not even round. The "head" varied from 0.219" to 0.221" but the "skirt" varied from 0.229" to 0.231" so it's no wonder they're often wide of the mark.

Having no real "length", shaped and sized as they are, it's probable that they'd tumble in the air so it's probable that even with a fixed gun, several firings would be all over the show.

[joamur_gosof]

hence the need to use a water barrel to kill D ..thanks for making my point clear CD 🙂

[bankhaunter]

There is a video on You Tube where a .22 pellet fired through a rifle powered by nailgun blanks punched through 3mm steel plate leaving a clean hole.

Better in fact than a .22 minimag.

[bankhaunter]

And I've just found this on a forum, sounds like the same type on gun I had.

I had one, about the size of a childs gun, bolt action single shot, smooth bored, if you put a .22 bullet in you could not hit a pastic cup at 5 yards,

[cee-dee]

I've just watched it but the nailgun charge looks more powerful than the .22 ammo? Also, the pellet had been pre-loaded in the (rifled) bore.

[bankhaunter]

The experiment was what it was but that and the posting on the forum does suggest the key factor may be the suspect accuracy of a smoothbore and of course how far away the victim was when shot.

I can't see much problem with reloading a bullet or finding a way to first fire it without damage.

[cee-dee]

Looking at the situation, they were after Grey Squirrels. Just how far away are they likely to be? Not far? 30 or 40 feet at most? So using LV shorts in rifles is just fine for that?

Now a smooth bore garden gun loaded with the same cartridge is also going to be OK? That post about not being able to hit a pastic (sic) cup at 5 yards (15 feet) seems a bit silly. (There's garden guns and garden guns? Some have very short barrels but some are much longer?)

Were we to meet (!!!!!) would you care to stand 40 feet away from me and allow me to fire a decent garden gun loaded with a LV short at your head?

The thread has taken some unusual (but interesting) turns and is a bit further away from what I asked in the OP?

[upthecreekyetagain]

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@cee-dee wrote:

UTCYA, have you ever taken a bullet out of a live .22 cartridge?

I have, I survived and to prove it I'm here.

A rimfire cartridge requires the rim (obviously) to be struck quite hard to fire it, it's not difficult to get the bullet out if you're careful.

What do you mean by "downloading" for ballistic matching?????

---

Personally I haven't but as a member of the Aldershot Pistol Club back in the 70s/80s I've seen it done.

As regards 'down loading' this is reducing the amount of charge in a cartridge prior to carrying out ballistic testing of a gun for forensic purposes.  This reduces the muzzle energy and reduces the likelihood of the bullet disintegrating on contact with water or gel whilst still producing the same striations.

[cee-dee]

I see, thanks for that but you'd have to be careful not to mark the bullet? OK, a .22 comes out pretty easily but how about larger calibres?

[upthecreekyetagain]

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@cee-dee wrote:

I see, thanks for that but you'd have to be careful not to mark the bullet? OK, a .22 comes out pretty easily but how about larger calibres?

---

I doubt forensic laboratories would actually reduce the amount of charge themselves - wouldn't they buy them in with a reduced charge?

[cee-dee]

I don't know but if a bullet from a crime scene had been found, it'd have to be identified first or a cartridge with one very like it would have to be found?

Then again, how a bullet reacts to the rifling would be affected by the charge?

One thing which would help in determining which gun from a group (as per the group in my OP) is the number of grooves as the number isn't the same for all manufacturers. A very quick eliminating factor is finding a fatal bullet had four grooves but a suspect weapon (as used by Lady C?) had 6.

[upthecreekyetagain]

Google never ceases to amaze

Found this link and it would appear that reducing the charge in a cartridge is actually carried out in forensic laboratories!

http://www.ballisticsresearch.com/dprs2.php

It is now possible to test fire a bullet into the Duke Projectile Recovery System, easily recover it and have 100% identification of the unique markings available. Unfortunately, using the conventional water tank method, only a small part of the bullet may remain intact that can be used for ballistics/forensic firearm identification. For high-speed bullets like 22s and 223s, less than 10% of the bullet typically is available for identification purposes; the rest breaks up into damaged fragments.