The importance of victim’s clothes in gunshot wounds

Determination of victim’s clothes in gunshot wounds is important due to the necessity of immediate workup in the emergency room as well as the legal aspects of cases. The aim of this study is to evaluate the importance of victim’s clothes in gunshot wounds referred to autopsy hall of legal medicine bureau of Tehran, Iran from 2014 to 2017. In this analytical comparative study, 202 consecutive cadavers of gunshot victims, referred to Tehran Legal Medical Hall from 2014 to 2017, were enrolled and the effect of shotgun and gunshot wound were determined and compared. Data were collected using a researcher-made questionnaire. The significance level of the tests was considered as P < 0.05. Spearman correlation coefficient and chi-square tests were used accordingly. The data were analyzed using SPSS software version 22. In this study, all women were killed by gunshot. Also, all of the 26 people who were killed by shotgun were men. The mean of age only in males was 39-48 years for shotgun, and 29-38 years in both genders for gunshot. Evaluation of their clothes in the emergency room and autopsy hall was helpful in 70% of cases in order to determine shot distance and type of gun (P = 0.0001). Conversely, we did not observe a significant difference between sex (P = 0.082) and the pattern of death (P = 0.211). Based on the obtained results, it seems that some characteristics of victim’s clothes may be useful to differentiate shotgun and gunshot.