Replies to post #304659 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Military style, not sure what that means.. I guess scary looking, maybe?

Bad guess. But not surprising that a small caliber mind misunderstands the effects of a small caliber round traveling at very high velocity.

As I posted last night, assault weapons ARE different. The fact that they and their rounds are light also means much more ammunition can be carried in fully loaded clips.

In other words a LOT of VERY high velocity ammo = the mass shootings we see all too frequently.


Heather Sher, a Fort Lauderdale-based radiologist who examined CT scans from some of the victims of the February 2018 Parkland school shooting, wrote about the effects of AR-15 rounds for the Atlantic:

Routine handgun injuries leave entry and exit wounds and linear tracks through the victim’s body that are roughly the size of the bullet. If the bullet does not directly hit something crucial like the heart or the aorta, and the victim does not bleed to death before being transported to our care at the trauma center, chances are that we can save him.

The bullets fired by an AR-15 are different: They travel at a higher velocity and are far more lethal than routine bullets fired from a handgun. The damage they cause is a function of the energy they impart as they pass through the body. A typical AR-15 bullet leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster than—and imparting more than three times the energy of—a typical 9mm bullet from a handgun.

…The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding.

Dr. Sydney Vail is a trauma surgeon with the Maricopa Integrated Health System in Phoenix, Arizona, and is an expert in treating gunshot trauma. He explained to us some of the factors that determine the dimensions of exit wounds:

If the .223 round from an AR-15 strikes the human body and only hits skin and muscle over a short distance, there is a chance the exit will look the same as the entrance or slightly larger. If the bullet yaws [turns left or right] there is a larger surface area to exit the skin and a slightly larger hole.

…The reason large holes or large exit wounds occur is usually the bullet hits bone, which then causes more damage and a greater surface area trying to exit the body. If the bullet is in the body a longer period of time — meaning [it travels] through more mass — then the body is absorbing a more maximal amount of kinetic energy, and the damage will definitely be more severe internally… To make big ugly holes as exit wounds means more mass has to exit the body than just the bullet.

Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist from San Francisco, California, explained to us the circumstances in which an AR-15 might leave behind an unusually large exit wound. By email, she told us:


An AR-15 round fired from contact range against the tightly stretched skin over the skull is more likely to cause a larger entrance wound because of gas entering in along with the bullet. The wound would be star shaped from splitting of the skin by the gas, not round as in the poster. An exceptionally large exit wound could also occur if fragmented bone and tissue exited along with the bullet. An AR-15 round fired through a person’s head, for example, could take fragmented skull and damaged brain matter with it, and this might be expected to be expelled through a larger exit wound.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ar-15-bullet-hole-size-wound/