In the last few days, I have seen a radical new talking point appear in the anti gun debate.
Well, a radiologist who consulted on the treatment of the Parkand victims wrote an OpEp in The Atlantic.
What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns
This is the most politically biased use of medial credentials since “Trump is mentally unstable because a psychologist watched him on TV” was the narrative of the day, I covered how being a professional in a technical field doesn’t necessary make someone unpolitical.
This radiologist goes on to describe what she say.
As I opened the CT scan last week to read the next case, I was baffled. The history simply read “gunshot wound.” I have been a radiologist in one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation for 13 years, and have diagnosed thousands of handgun injuries to the brain, lung, liver, spleen, bowel, and other vital organs. I thought that I knew all that I needed to know about gunshot wounds, but the specific pattern of injury on my computer screen was one that I had seen only once before.
In a typical handgun injury that I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ like the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, grey bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.
I was looking at a CT scan of one of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, with extensive bleeding. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?
Now I am not a radiologist or MD of any kind for that matter. What I am is someone with experience in ballistics.
The above is a load of shit. The terminal ballistics of a bullet is dependent on several criteria, including velocity and bullet design.
Anybody on the gun web has known about the complaints that the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge is considered by some to be insufficient for combat use, which necessitated the development of the M855A1 for enhanced performance.
The argument that a handgun bullet makes is little hole and a rifle bullet turns people into liquid is a stupid argument, bereft of any knowledge of bullet design and performance.
It also goes against what was said about handguns by anti gun activists about 20 years ago. Back then the outrage du jour was “cop killer” bullets. The target of their ignorant vitriol was the Winchester Black Talon, which a MD said would “explode inside a person like a thousand razor blades.”
So which is it? Are handgun bullets more or less dangerous than rifle rounds? Which explodes inside of people? Can you at least keep your bullshit consistent?
The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle which delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.
Again, anybody who knows anything about guns knows that an AR-15 fires primarily 223 Rem/5.56. The terminal performance isn’t a function of the gun but of the ammo.
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 they do not bleed to death before being transported to our care at a trauma center, chances are, we can save the victim.
For a FMJ, maybe.
The bullets fired by an AR-15 are different; they travel at higher velocity and are far more lethal. 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.
Technically correct about the velocity, but not much more than that.
With an AR-15, the shooter does not have to be particularly accurate. The victim does not have to be unlucky. If a victim takes a direct hit to the liver from an AR-15, the damage is far graver than that of a simple handgun shot injury. Handgun injuries to the liver are generally survivable unless the bullet hits the main blood supply to the liver. An AR-15 bullet wound to the middle of the liver would cause so much bleeding that the patient would likely never make it to a trauma center to receive our care.
Personally, I would consider a liver shot to be a good center of mass hit. They are very lethal, regardless of the round used, because the liver doesn’t stretch much and it tears and bleeds easily. The idea that a handgun round (especially with a good JHP) to the liver is less lethal than a rifle round is bullshit, backed up by medial evidence.
As a doctor, I feel I have a duty to inform the public of what I have learned as I have observed these wounds and cared for these patients. It’s clear to me that AR-15 or other high-velocity weapons, especially when outfitted with a high-capacity magazine, have no place in a civilian’s gun cabinet.
There is the kicker. The 223/5.56 is just too lethal for civilians to own. No more center fire rifles for us.
I have friends who own AR-15 rifles; they enjoy shooting them at target practice for sport, and fervently defend their right to own them. But I cannot accept that their right to enjoy their hobby supersedes my right to send my own children to school, to a movie theater, or to a concert and to know that they are safe.
They have no “right to be safe.” That is impossible. Also, what threat does her friends’ AR-15’s pose to her children? I assume she thinks her friends are responsible.
If politicians want to back comprehensive mental-health reform, I am all for it. As a medical doctor, I’ve witnessed firsthand the toll that mental-health issues take on families and the individuals themselves who have no access to satisfactory long-term mental-health care. But the president and Congress should not use this issue as an excuse to deliberately overlook the fact that the use of AR-15 rifles is the common denominator in many mass shootings.
“let me use my medical authority to push a purely political point. Anybody who disagrees with the Politburo or Communism is insane.”
A medical professor taught me about the dangers of drawing incorrect conclusions from data with the example of gum chewing, smokers, and lung cancer. He said smokers may be more likely to chew gum to cover bad breath, but that one cannot look at the data and decide that gum chewing causes lung cancer. It is the same type of erroneous logic that focuses on mental health after mass shootings, when banning the sale of semi-automatic rifles would be a far more effective means of preventing them.
That is exactly 100% the opposite. According to SLATE, there are almost 2.5 Million AR-15’s in the US. I was talking with someone who said that during the height of the gun boom, DMPS did a record month of over 12,000 rifles built and shipped. If this had to do with guns and not mental health at anything close to the rate of cancer in smokers, there would be multiple school shootings per week. This is a statistically bullshit argument.
As a radiologist, I have now seen high velocity AR-15 gunshot wounds firsthand, an experience that most radiologists in our country will never have. I pray that these are the last such wounds I have to see, and that AR-15-style weapons and high-capacity magazines are banned for use by civilians in the United States, once and for all.
“I still know nothing about guns except that I hate them and will use gory stories from the hospital to shock people into associating ‘high velocity bullets’ with gun bans.”
On its own, this is one hack MD’s opinion. However, this “high velocity bullet” thing is becoming a trend.
Senator Chris Murphy’s description of an assault rifle is “long rifle semi automatic” weapons with bullets that travel “three times the speed of a handgun.” It’s not the function of the gun anymore, is the ammo. No more center fire rifle ammo for us, especially out of semi auto rifles.
Of course something from MSNBC, which I touched on in a previous Post.
It’s that same “three times as fast as a handgun” argument. Also, giving bullet velocity in MPH is just fucking stupid. It’s actually scarier as 3,200 FPS.
This is the next terrible direction they are going.
They are going to scare the ignorant about centerfire rifles the same way they did about “cop killer” bullets. If you don’t think that is frightening, just remember that New Jersey you can’t carry hollowpoints, even if you magically have a NJ carry permit. Several states banned Teflon coated ammo (Teflon does nothing on impact, anybody who tells you “the Teflon makes the bullet slip between the fibers of bullet proof vest” is wrong and an idiot – it’s like saying they can fuck someone through a pair of jeans if they sprayed PAM on their dick). The ATF banned bullets for handguns that are made of brass, contain steel, beryllium copper, or meet other qualifications that they say are “armor pricing.”
The media called for a ban on M855 ammo as “cop killer” bullets which was almost implemented.
The anti gun establishment is going for a two prong approach to a gun ban. Rehashing the old assault weapon ban is one prong. The other is going after high velocity ammo. The later is even worse because it will apply to every centerfire rifle in America. They can say “semi auto” all they want, but every bottleneck centerfire rifle cartridge in America that I can think of exceeds 2,000 FPS.
If they manage to pull that one off, every centerfire rifle in America is at risk, which obviously is their point.
Like this:
Like Loading...
