Ballistic Basics

So you're writing a contemporary or historical mystery, or a romantic suspense thriller, or an urban fantasy, and your hero's packing but you don't know beans about guns. And your heroine's a ballistics technician in the city's Anti-Lycan Policing Organization (ALPO) and she's going to make the positive ballistics identification on the silver bullet that took down the head of the Wolverine gang, but you've got the same problem there. And you don't want to depend on CSI Paranormal, because y...