Forensics on the brain too much…

[rat­ings]
I just got back from trav­el­ing out of state to attend my grandfather’s funeral. He was a dec­o­rated WWII vet­eran and very active in the VFW for the rest of his life. He was the state com­man­der of the VFW at one point.

Point being I was there dur­ing the ser­vices the American Legion was giv­ing, and they per­formed a 3 blank dis­charge of a series of 4 M1 Garands, as is com­mon in mil­i­tary funerals.

When the cer­e­mony was over, I asked some­one to go col­lect the remain­ing spent cas­ings from the rocks, while I was help­ing com­fort my mother who was quite emotional.

I was given 4 spent cas­ings. When I had time to look at them, I com­mented to a rel­a­tive that there were sam­ples from 3 of the 4 rifles, because these last two were fired from the same one. I wasn’t 100% sure with­out a com­par­i­son scope of course, but there were some pretty dis­tinct dif­fer­ences in two of them when com­pared to the other two.

Like I said, prob­a­bly not where my head should have been at the time, but it shows you how much hav­ing a fun, reward­ing career like foren­sic sci­ence can show up in every day life.