Much like fingerprints, guns leave unique markings on casings.
Those markings help the Chattanooga Police Department’s gun unit link guns to crimes, sometimes forming sprawling webs of incidents, revealing just how intertwined the city’s gun crimes can be.
Last month, 15-year-old Ja’Mond Moorer was convicted of second-degree murder in the 2018 shooting death of 18-year-old Iziyah Spence. A ballistic match aided in that conviction by showing how a gun was linked to the evidence found at the scene.
It’s just one of a growing list of cases that ballistic evidence has helped close.
Chattanooga’s gun unit has been in place for a year now, and already it has become a nationally recognized model for how mid-sized cities can track – and hopefully reduce – gun violence, law enforcement experts say.