A case of suicide using a home-modified gun.

The problem of the possibility of modifying blank cartridge dummy firearms to make them fire a real bullet has long been known, but the phenomenon has been constantly on the increase in the recent years. In Italy, there are no restrictions on the purchase of an inoffensive weapon. However, few modifications are frequently enough to transform the inoffensive weapon into a harmful one: a procedure is often undertaken to avoid the mandatory control and registration of firearms. We describe a case of suicide of a man in Trieste, Italy, in 2002, with a blank cartridge dummy pistol that had been modified to fire homemade bullets. Today the achievement of a proper control of the spread of firearms is a serious problem worldwide. In particular, this is true in the case of weapons the lethal nature of which can be masked to pass a superficial examination, with the aim of evading the security laws in all nations. For various reasons, individuals may become illicit holders of firearms of various types and natures, often made out of common objects produced for other purposes. These can be bought on the market or found at home, but after assembly and proper modifications, they can be transformed into true weapons, homemade guns that work perfectly and are potentially lethal. The situation is slightly different in the case of home-modified guns, in which the transformed object was already a weapon, but originally produced to fire blank cartridges, as a replica or a toy (such as air guns or gas guns, or other instruments like tear-gas pen guns and pellet guns), that are available on the market and can be easily modified to convert them into harmful weapons. These are peculiar events that demonstrate a particular manual skill and ingenuity of their inventors, and make extremely difficult to identify the weapon used, in case of its absence on the scene-of-crime, or the dynamics of the event.