The intro section says this is a discredited trope, but there is no explanation of why. I'm curious—what makes this discredited? In other words, why can't you determine the handedness of the killer based on the position of the wounds? (Obviously it wouldn't be 100% accurate, but you could make a better-than-chance prediction of handedness, couldn't you?)
I think it would be helpful to have a sentence or two explaining why police do not attempt to rely on this information.
(Also, many of the examples involve fake suicides with the gun being found in the wrong hand. That sounds like pretty compelling evidence to me.)
'For this to be relevant, the killer must turn out to be left-handed (or the killer's right-handedness will rule out a leftie suspect).'
Are there really that many instances where simply the fact that the killer is left-handed is enough to suspect someone? In pretty much every instance of this trope that I can find, it's simply handedness distinguishing between two suspects - for the reason that unless the work is set in a time when there were very few lefties as nearly all were forced to be right-handed, 10% of the population is a lot.
But in spite of the only important thing being that the suspect and the real killer have differing handedness, it's still almost invariably a left-handed killer. Because lefties are evil.
I'm highly tempted to add the following Stinger:
Oh, good work. I did it all right. But, as it turns out, I can kill even better... with my right hand.
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Edited by egv78