Mystery shooting: Woman on boat hit by bullet near Skaggs Island

A shooting Sunday afternoon near Skaggs Island left a woman wounded and Sonoma County sheriff's deputies searching for who did it, officials said.

The woman, who wasn't identified, was taken to an area hospital by private car.

At about 12:30 p.m., she was riding in a boat on a slough near Skaggs Island with family members. Someone in the area fired a shot and she was hit in the face.

The shooting may have been accidental, but that remained unknown late Sunday afternoon as deputies continued looking for the shooter, sheriff's Sgt. Mark Fuston said.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20091011/articles/910119964&tc=yahoo

on edit: just noticed his postings lower down

I don't know why he cannot put them all in one thread.

Dave got into the habit of flooding the forum with DGU stories in response to other people flooding the forum with illegitimate shooting stories.

... but it would be nice if the floods of all shooting stories could be all put into one post.

maybe when I see gun or shooting I just read the next heading, and don't remember.
I don't read all posts, just posts that are interesting.
Unfortunately, repeated posts by one person do attract attention - so I guess your posts get attention that way.
But it is annoying.

If there is one about guns, I skip and don't remember.
If there are probably two, then I skip and don't remember.
But, seeing more over and over, one takes notice.
Patterns grab people's attention, and repeated posts are a pattern.

It should be enlightening.

Each featuring one news report about illegitimate use of a firearm. That's what I'm talking about.

Are you know going to criticize one handle for putting hers in different posts also?

Change over time with barrel wear or different weights of bullets. CSI has been lying to you.

and retest...

QED: This doesn't work the way you think it does. Not even close.

Every new firearm sold in Maryland is recorded. All of them.

You don't seriously think only one new firearm sold in the last 5 years was used in a crime in the state of Maryland, do you?

Let's suppose for a moment that at least every single handgun in the country could be entered into a ballistics imaging database. You recover some brass from a crime scene, compare it against the database, how many matches do you think you're going to get?

Again, ballistics markings aren't so much comparable to fingerprint as they are to, say, shoe prints. Let's say you find a nice pair of prints in the ground at a crime scene, clear enough to let you work out that the shoes were Carhartt work boots with Vibram soles, size 10 EE, with wear on the outsides of the heels, a gouge under the left toe and a thumbtack embedded in the right arch. Now, if in a suspect's closet, you find a pair of shoes matching the cast you took of those prints, you've got forensic evidence.

But suppose you have a footwear imaging database, with an image of every pair of boots sold in the country. If you run your cast through the database, you're not going to get an exact match with any entry, because the gouge, thumbtack and wear to the heels weren't there when the boots were new. Instead, the database produces close matches with every pair of boots with that particular type of sole that Carhartt ever sold. Several thousand close matches.

The story with a ballistics imaging database is remarkably similar. An image of the ballistic markings a gun left when it was new aren't going to match those left by that same gun after it's had a few hundred rounds put through it, and possibly had the firing pin and/or the extractor replaced. So you feed a cartridge case image into the database, it's almost certainly going to come out with no exact matches, and as many close matches as the size of the production run of that particular weapon, because they were all pretty much the same when they were just off the production line.

n/t

I have long suspected that if they would fingerprint the population of the world, they would find out that there are only a million prints and that six thousand people have the same prints as you do.

Maryland and New York state have spent half a million and a million a year on their databases, respectively. The time, money and manpower thus expended has resulted in exactly one conviction over a nine-year period.

The problem is that ballistics serves a purpose only in providing corroborating evidence. If you have a gun you suspect is the weapon used in a particular crime for other reasons, ballistics can confirm or refute that suspicion. The caveat being that the gun can't have been fired much between the crime and the test, because firing the gun causes minute wear and tear on the firing pin, the extractor, ejector and barrel, which alters the markings it leaves on the bullet and cartridge case.

And that's the problem with ballistic imaging databases: if you enter a cartridge case fired when the gun was brand new, by the time the owner has put a few hundred rounds through the gun, it's no longer an exact match. At best, it'll tell you what make and model of firearm it was, but that doesn't require a ballistic imaging database.

And if you don't have a cartridge case from the scene, a database won't help you at all.

The barrel does take some wear from having a piece of copper-jacketed lead propelled through it at high velocity, so the markings a gun leaves on bullets fired from it change as well. Moreover, bullets tend to deform when they hit something hard (like bone, or a few layers of drywall), so it's very rare to recover a usable spent bullet from a crime scene. Most cases that are settled by ballistics are done on the basis of cartridge cases.

The whole gangsta holding-the-gun-on-its-side thing comes from L.A. drive-by shootings; the shooter would keep the window rolled up as far as possible (and gun muzzles are usually less wide than they are tall, so the window can be rolled up further if you hold the gun sideways) to prevent cartridge cases from being ejected out of the car. That tells you what the career criminals are most concerned about.

The fundamental problem with ballistics imaging databases is that ballistic markings are not the firearm equivalent of fingerprints, but more like the firearm equivalent of tire tracks. That is, both guns and motor vehicles of the same make and model are going to leave almost identical tracks, and most of the variation between individual guns and vehicles is going to develop after they've been entered into an imaging database, which also means their tracks going deviate from the image in the database. An imaging database doesn't help you find a (specific) needle in a haystack; it just dumps a box of needles which aren't the one you're looking for into the haystack as well.

..... and get floor plans, three D angles, and view projections.

Otherwise mechanical wear will change the patterns left on subsequent bullets.


Look, the bullet of a gun is generally copper-jacketed lead. The bullet itself is actually larger than the barrel of the gun. Pressure from the propellent forces the bullet down the barrel, squeezing the bullet until it's small enough to fit down the hole. Copper builds up on the inside of th barrel, changing the fingerprint, as does the simple wear of forcing something a 0.005" too big down a hole. At Mach 1 or so, I might add.

Metal-on-metal causes wear, physical erosion of the gun barrel and other working parts.



Besides, this is de facto gun registration.

that 'ballistic fingerprint'.

These systems are in use in certain places and have never once solved a crime. You might as well pour money into a hole in the ground.

Ballistics imaging databases don't work. Maryland's spent $5 million and Ghu only knows how many police man hours on its database for one conviction--one--and even the MSP wants to ditch it because they think the resources would (not "could," "would") be better spent elsewhere. New York state's spent $7 million on its database with zero results. How much more evidence do you need that they're white elephants?

By the description, under Washington state law, this would be a 3rd degree assault (criminal negligence with a weapon resulting in bodily harm to another), a class C felony. I'd look up the relevant charge in the California Penal Code, but the California legislature's website is really hard to navigate.

Feel free to back up your accusation.

First time you scrub out a barrel with a brass cleaning brush, you change the ballistic fingerprint of the weapon. Period. End of story. It is not like a human fingerprint.

I made one mistake though, one time, 5 years ago, a SINGLE conviction was made in a case in Maryland, because the weapon was only 3 weeks old. No cleanings, no wear. They were able to link it. In 9 years, and millions of wasted dollars, a single conviction, in a best-case scenario where the weapon had no wear since it was fingerprinted. One trip to the range and it probably wouldn't have matched anymore. ONE conviction, in a case where they probably could have gotten a conviction anyway through normal investigative means. Oh boy.

Yeah, let's dump millions into this PROVEN TECHNOLOGY of yours.

Why don't you refute what EM, AC and K42 are saying? Are you scared because you know you're wrong?

Your computer(s)? Your internet modem?

How about your printer? Lots of counterfeit money is made on home printers. A national inkjet database is just good law enforcement techniques.


CD-Rs and DVD-Rs should be given a unique serial number as well, with each purchase registered with the government.


And I think that every time you go to the ATM the machine should record the serial numbers of the cash dispensed and record it to the Treasury Department.

And neither state has yet solved a single crime with their archived ballistic data.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19876-2005Apr1.html

One.

One conviction. Two states. Millions of dollars. No reason to think this crime couldn't have been solved anwyway through normal means...

... just in case they ever commit a crime.

I'm sure you wouldn't mind the cops going door to door to take a swab of you and all your family members, whether you like it or not. The most important thing is that they be able to quickly find the criminals, right?

After all if you have nothing to hide why should you object? Oh, wait a minute, wasn't that Dick Cheney's point of view too? Wow, you guys have a lot in common about the needless use of civil rights.

Heck, if you want to throw the 2nd amendment in the crapper, why not just save some time on the way to your obviously preferred police state and include the 4th while you're at it?

You might have a leg to stand on if anyone could ever show that the data bases they already have in place had actually ever been used to solve a crime. But they haven't, mainly because .... criminals don't obey the laws requiring the registration of a casing and fired round any more than they file a 4473 when they buy or rent a gun out of the trunk of a car.

A person's DNA doesn't change over time.

Eventually, this WILL happen whether we like it or not.
DNA samples will be taken at birth (probably already happening).

Why don't you read Euromutt's posts?

Also, the rest won't part with our rights as easily as you would.

The joy you take in posting these tragedies is despicable.

There would be fewer tragedies if people were more responsible, and people are more responsible if they are aware.

But maybe they were separate because of your posts.

Yes, everyone is entitled to their opinion and if your life is involved with helping others (which I respect), then maybe you feel a need for your posts.

I don't want to argue, and I should not complain, but the repeated posts were annoying.
I should just keep my annoyance to myself, and be thankful that I have not been the victim of a gun shooting.
Thankfully, where I live I don't believe people have guns. I am very lucky.

newspaper stories provide a useful training exercise.

You read the story and than try to determine how you would have handled the situation and even better, how you might have avoid it entirely.

Often on gun forums such stories are analyzed extensively. Often what would be described as a righteous shooting here gets a lot of criticism on those forums. It's always better to totally avoid having to use your firearm.

If you think about it, cops also train to avoid using their firearms.

Here, the purpose may be to show those who believe violence never happens to nice people that it does and that nice people can fight back and win.

They are legally barred from possessing firearms. In regards to your assertion about children we need to define the term child before we can have a reasonable discussion.

I'm not sure I believe you.

You know NOTHING and have NOTHING to support your wild fantasy falmebait BS postings.

Do they have DU in paradise?

It's the guns forum after all.

"Thankfully, where I live I don't believe people have guns. I am very lucky." Where's that? Because just because you see don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. You feel lucky for responsible gun owners.

So you make no sense.

Why do you prefer that people be unable to defend themselves?

Typical grabber.

Bullets will often skip off of water like a hard surface. A point that is repeatedly driven home in hunter safety education courses. That's why you aren't supposed to shoot at deer across a river, or part of a lake.