Fall 2006 SWGGUN Meeting Summary
SWGGUN recently
met in Stafford, VA on November 14-16, 2006.
Fourteen of the Board Members were present at
the meeting; four members were not in attendance
and three resignations were accepted by the
Board.
Congratulations are in order to Mark Keisler of
the Indiana State Police, Doug Lancon of the
Acadiana Criminalistics Laboratory and Edward
Wallace of LGC Forensics for being elected to
the Board from a pool of extremely qualified
firearm and toolmark examiners working in the
discipline.
Final approval was granted for the adoption of
the “Guidelines for Trigger Pull Analysis”
document. This document is available under the
“Guidelines” tab on the website. Numerous
sources including the data collected from the
research performed at Quantico the past several
years and the experiment conducted at AFTE 2005
in Indianapolis, IN were used when drafting this
document.
The ISO Transition committee continues to work
on a draft document to assist examiners in
identifying areas that the firearm and toolmark
examiner community may want to consider when
attempting to achieve ISO 17025 accreditation.
This committee continues to seek any input from
all firearm and toolmark examiners within the
discipline that may be considering ISO
accreditation.
The scientific working group has compiled a
substantial amount of information on evidence
admissibility and placed it in one location in
an attempt to assist examiners when preparing
for court or evidence admissibility challenges.
Please review the information compiled under the
“Resources” tab. We are currently preparing a
visual presentation that will be useful to the
Criminal Justice System as well.
A summary of the SWGGUN Survey results were
compiled and is posted here for your review. The
survey was sent to 225 laboratories from a list
obtained by the National Forensic Science
Technology Center (NFSTC). We received 177
individual responses from 131 of these
laboratories.
Ongoing projects that are being addressed by
SWGGUN are:
- ISO
Transition-defining the standards.
- Daubert
Challenges in the field of Firearm and
Toolmark Identification.
- SWGGUN
Survey regarding general acceptance.
These
committees are working to develop a product that
can be posted on the SWGGUN website for review
and comments from the forensic community. SWGGUN
continues to operate its own website at
www.swggun.org
and solicits valuable input from the discipline
through a number of different mechanisms during
the development stages of the guidelines in
which we produce. These guidelines/documents are
then posted on the website for your review and
we encourage peer review of these materials.
Feel free to contact a Board Member with your
comments/concerns or visit us at the “Feedback
Forum” tab above.
Thank you for allowing us to serve you. Board
member information can be found under the
“Members” tab. We look forward to hearing from
you and encourage your continued participation
in these ongoing projects that ultimately affect
our work product.
Thomas L.G. Price –Chair, SWGGUN
