The Frangible Bullet

When gun designers in the 1800's started machining grooves into gun barrels, they believed it would reduce the residue buildup of lead and gunpowder byproducts that clogged up a rifle and made it useless until cleaned. This residue usually fouled a rifle after ten or so rounds, making the gun--and the soldier using it--useless, right in the heat of battle.

Turns out it didn't, it took jacketed bullets and improved gunpowder to eliminate the clogging problem. But they did discover that "rifling" the barrel greatly improved accuracy. Rifles with rifling put into the hands of infantrymen increased their accuracy and effectiveness out to as much as 1500 yards, eventually eliminating the old tactic of lining up, marching forward, firing once, and then attacking with fixed bayonets. The Generals in our Civil War and even WW1 never understood the vast battlefield changes ushered in by rifling and increased accuracy... Which led to the huge number of dead and wounded in those conflicts.

Law enforcement then discovered that this rifling created markings on the bullet as unique as fingerprints, allowing the gun that fired a bullet to be positively identified by this marking.

Advance to now... where law enforcement has a major problem of shooting themselves way too often because of richocets and thin walls. Bullets fired by the police will sometimes hit a target and then continue on until hitting another target, often another police officer.

So now they have created a bullet that turns into powder after entering flesh or hitting a solid surface. It's called a "frangible" bullet. The root of that term is "frangere", old latin meaning "to break up". It can stop or kill a target just like old fashioned bullets, but they do not ricochet or pass through a body and continue on.

Law enforement loves this... No more killing off each other(or at least less of it) than in the good old days.

Guess who else is going to love this bullet? Criminals of all stripes. Now you will be able to kill somebody and keep your favorite gun, totally confident that the bullet did it's job and then turned to dust. The CSI type dudes won't even know what the caliber was, until manufacturers start putting chemical markers into the bullets providing a different marker for each caliber. But then all you'll have is chemically marked 45 caliber( or whatever) dust.

Chemical markers will no doubt eventually identify the caliber, the manufacturer and the date of manufacture, maybe even where the ammo was sold, stuff all easily bypassed by a potential killer who will buy in an area remote to the murder and then toss any extra rounds from the same purchase, and--of course--give the gun a good cleaning so none of those chemical markers are found on or in it.

No doubt these bullets will be illegal in the hands of anybody except law enforcement, but so what? When did being illegal ever stop a criminal? And there are people who will sell anything to anybody so long as a profit is involved.

Start looking for murders where these frangible bullets left nothing behind but a corpse and a bit of dust.