``8 mm home made bullet fired from home made gun barrel will be able to produce similar grazing wound as observed on the abdomen of President Chen.''
Pages 86-91 of the Lee Report described three sets of tests, on which the conclusions on page 92 was based. The first set was conducted in Connecticut State Police Forensic Laboratory outdoor firing range. The report did not mention the type of firearms used, nor what the target was. At the bottom of page 86, muzzle velocity of three commercial rifles were cited. No further information was given. So far as we can see, the first set of tests has little relevance to the conclusion on page 92, item 5.
The second set of tests was conducted by an independent group, lead by Mr. Chen Hu. They used home-made 8 mm bullets, fired from a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol with a home-made 8 mm barrel. The propellant used was the ``Bullseye'' brand smokeless gun powder and black powder from firecrackers. Garments, target boards and ordnance gelatin blocks were used as targets.75 A high speed camera was used to record the trajectory after impact. The impact velocity was estimated to be 532.4 ft/sec (162.2 m/sec).
The third set of tests was conducted by the CIB. See §8 for more information. The CIB gave their estimate of the impact velocity as ``approximately 180 m/sec''; see 8.3.
What is the basis for the sweeping conclusion in item 5, page 92 of [L1]? The first set of tests is useless for that. The second set of tests, by the independent group, used gelatin blocks as the target. One can determine the range of impact velocity with gelatin blocks. However gelatin blocks cannot be used as skin simulant, and the Chen Hu group did not conduct any shooting test to reconstruct the abdominal graze wound.76Therefore the Lee Committee's conclusion concerning the ability to produce ``similar graze wound'' must have relied heavily on the CIB shooting experiment.
As we have seen in §8, the CIB experiment produced a grand total of three valid shots. The second shot did not produce a graze wound; the bullet stopped inside the fat layer of the pig skin. The first shot produced a 3.6 cm long graze wound. The third shot produced a ``two-point discontinuous graze wound''; the distance between the two points was approximately 6 cm. Finally, we remind our readers that pig skin from butchered adult pigs are very different from live human skin in terms of mechanical and thermal properties.
The damage patterns produced by the CIB's shooting experiment did not at all match the government-provided evidence. One has to question, on what basis did the Lee Committee make the conclusion that ``8 mm home made bullet fired from home made gun barrel will be able to produce similar grazing wound as observed on the abdomen of President Chen.''?