close-range wound

MaryW commented on the word close-range wound

Guns leave distinct types of wounds at different ranges. A contact wound, with the gun touching or pressed into the skin, can sear a round scorch mark called a muzzle stamp. If the gun is near the target but not touching it, hot particulate debris leaves stippling, a confetti pattern of abrasions around the bullet hole. If the gun is fired from closer than six inches (a close-range wound) then there will also be soot around the wound. Anything more than six but fewer than thirty inches, with stippling but not soot, is called an intermediate-range wound. If a wound has none of these features—no soot and no stippling—then it's a distant-range bullet wound. Whether the gun was fired from thirty inches or thirty yards away, it will leave a neat hole and nothing else.

Judy Melinek, M.D. & T.J. Mitchell, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner (New York: Scribner: 2014), p. 117 (emphasis added).

March 8, 2016