Ballistic evidence is more commonly known as ballistic fingerprinting. It is an area of forensics that uses different methods to help find out how people were shot and what gun that the crime was committed with. When it comes to ballistic evidence, I expect to find a lot of talk around the 1940’s and 1950’s because of the war. The amount of ballistic evidence that could have been mentioned in response to the world war that just got finished. Time Magazine might have made a response to the Holocaust and could have mentioned the ballistic evidence of the crimes and atrocities that were committed during that time. I always expect to see a jump again in the late 1990’s and the 2000’s so that it will be in benefit of my argument that CSI has affected the history by changing the type of language we use.

Here are my results:

Picture 10. This is a screenshot taken by my MacBook Pro of the Time Magazine Corpus Text Mine of “Ballistics Evidence”.

These results are really surprising. There is absolutely no mention of it prior to the 1980’s. There is exactly one mention in two different decades. There is one mention on Monday, November 12, 1984 in Times Magazine written in the article “Italy: Secret Film”. The sentence is as follows: “Now Martella is said to have a heretofore secret film that-along with medical reports, ballistic evidence and eyewitness accounts-lends further credence to the two-gunman theory” (“Italy: Secret Film”, 1984). It shows that ballistic evidence is something than can help criminal cases come up with or disprove theories.

There is one more mention on Monday December 15, 2003 in a Times Magazine article written by Jyoti Thottam called “Driving in the Line of Fire”. The sentences is as follows: “Authorities in Ohio last week said 14 recent shootings in the area were linked, five of them through ballistic evidence” (Thottam, 2003). The story is in response to the shootings that were happening around that time. That evidence helped them link the cases and most likely help get the crimes solved. I will next text mine a little more broadly. 

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