DOI: https://doi.org/10.36347/sjet.2026.v14i10.004

Pages: 629-643

Forensic reconstruction of shooting incidents routinely assumes that a projectile travels in a straight line between its entry and exit wounds. This study tested that assumption experimentally by comparing bullet trajectories from rifled and smoothbore firearms within calibrated ballistic gelatine. Three handguns representing the principal archetypes encountered in South Asian casework were used: an Indian Ordnance Factory 7.65 mm rifled semi-automatic pistol, an Indian Ordnance Factory .32″ rifled break-open revolver, and a country-made 7.65 mm smoothbore pistol. Six analytical shots (two per firearm, each into a fresh block) were fired from a fixed muzzle-to-target distance of 1.07 m into 12.5% w/w Type-A 250-Bloom porcine gelatine blocks, calibrated to a penetration depth of 8.5–9.5 cm. Preset vertical angles were +15° elevation for the smoothbore pistol, 0° for the semi-automatic pistol and −10° decline for the revolver, with the firing bench rotated 10° to the right of the laboratory baseline. Blocks were sectioned along the sagittal midline and the internal wound track was measured directly. Both rifled firearms produced parabolic wound tracks with perpendicular deviations of 0.3–1.6 cm from the entry–exit chord, and straight-line angle estimation returned errors of 7° and 13°; in the revolver case a bullet fired at a 10° decline yielded an apparent 3° elevation, reversing the sign of the reconstructed angle. The smoothbore pistol produced linear tracks with estimation errors of 1°, within measurement tolerance, but wound channels an order of magnitude wider (10–70 mm against a uniform 11.7–13.2 mm for the rifled firearms) and markedly non-uniform. Horizontal deviation was ≤1° for all firearms. These observations indicate that the straight-line method retains validity for smoothbore weapons but can be substantially misleading for rifled weapons at close range, and that firearm type should be established before a trajectory reconstruction method is selected. Gi