Okay. First off, if any essential facts I’m about to rekay are misrepresented or in error, feel free to correct me.
Secondly, this is merely my morbid curiosity at work here. My enemies need not quake with any more terror than is usual for a Thursday.
Commotio Cordis, or cardiac concussion, occurs in young athletes when a blunt object — baseball, football, hockey puck – travelling between 30-40mph strikes the chest just above the heart, in a low-impact non-penetrating blow during a certain 20 second long window while the heart is beating. Upshot: the heart stops. Unless defilibration occurs within the first two minutes, the blow is likely fatal.
So: is this likely to occur in a typical fistfight? Could an angry teenager punch another one in his chest with his fist and cause the same effect? Can an untrained punch reach 40mph?
Could this occur in a between professional boxers or martial artists? Or are their chests sufficiently well-developed to prevent this from happening?
“Although CC usually involves impact from a baseball, it has also been reported during hockey, softball, lacrosse, karate, and 6 other sports activities in which a relatively hard projectile or bodily contact has caused impact to the precordium”
So a human punch can indeed induce Commotio Cordis. It seems to be more dependent upon timing rather than force - there is a critical 15 millisecond window per heartbeat during which the blow has to be landed. Force is relevant however, and the hardness of the striking object:
“Softer-than-normal baseballs reduced the risk of ventricular fibrillation to 8% with very soft baseballs, 22% with medium soft baseballs, and 29% with the least soft baseballs. The predilection for CC to affect individuals younger than 16 years in particular probably relates to chest configuration (ie, narrower anterior-posterior diameter) and increased chest compliance in young children, predisposing them to cardiac electrical disturbances that occur following only modest precordial trauma.”
Now, maybe it’s possible to hit hard enough with a fist in the right place to do this to an adult, but the timing requirement makes it extremely unlikely to work except by fluke.
And after spending thirty years of training developing accuracy, speed, timing, and hearing so exquisite they can listen for a heartbeat at a distance, the pirates simply shoot them.
ah, but they must first find a target to shoot at. kinda difficult to kill shadows, especially so when you know it’s listening to your heart thumping in fear.
Shadows? Pah. Simply set the whole place ablaze with burning rum, and loot and pillage the warm ashes after the ninjas have been forced from their hiding places by the all-enveloping flames and put mercilessly to the cutlass point, except for one or two you save for the kind of entertainment that features eight feet of six-by-two and some shark-infested waters.
Shadows running round in front of you trying to punch you in the chest might be a bit easier to shoot. And even if you miss the first time, the noise of one shot in their heartbeat-sensitive ears will cause ALL of them to reel back holding their heads and going “aiiieeee!”
I’d like to see a cite that a punch delivered by a human can reach 40 mph.
David Willoughby (in his book, The Super Athletes) did some calculations of the speed of punch of various heavyweight boxers, and IIRC even Joe Louis could not punch as quickly as that.
Forty miles per hour is, what, 58.6 feet per second. Assuming the punch travels three feet, that would be 19.5 milliseconds. Seems to be at least at, if not above, the upper limits of what can be achieved.
My math is probably off. Maybe an engineer could correct me.
To address the OP, I don’t doubt that it could be done in theory, but not consistently. When it happens, I wonder if there might be some underlying cardiac defect or underdevelopment to contribute.
I suspect the “40 mph” figure comes from the average speed of a struck baseball. The cite I gave earlier states:
“In most instances (68%), the person was struck by a projectile, which most commonly was a pitched, thrown, or batted baseball or softball, estimated to be traveling at 30-50 mph at most. Other projectiles have included hockey pucks and lacrosse balls. In 32%, chest trauma was from bodily contact with another person or a stationary object. Examples of this have included a player’s helmet during a football tackle, the heel of a hockey stick, a karate kick, and body collision.”
There’s no reason why this effect should require a particular speed of collision. I agree that 40 mph is probably a fair bit faster than a human can punch. (I make it 58.7 ft/s, so there!)
Now, back to what’s important - could a pirate with a pair of flintlocks and a musket drop a ninja before he could deliver his chest-punch of death?
I read a news of teh weird where an eleven or twelve year old kid killed another kid his age by punching him in the chest. Apparently there were a group ofthem who were playing some sort of a game where they traded licks. I looked for it the other day when a similar topic came up but was unable to find it.
So it’s possible, yet unlikely. Most people just sore when you punch them in the chest.
Tangentially related to the OP, a buddy of mine and I were horsing around and I punched him, lightly!, on the solar plexus. Really it was just a tap. His eyes rolled back in his head and he fainted. He was unconscious for about 3 seconds and came to very confused. I was a little confused and freaked out as well! We laughed about it and said maybe we had discovered the “Ninja Death Touch” but can anyone explain what might have happened?
Hellooo, pirate. Tueller drill is pointless for pirates, as they don’t wait for their enemies to attack, or even declare themselves; they just shoot or stab everyone who’s not part of the crew. If you’re quick, though, you can plead for your life in exchange for ransom or slavery before your head comes off.
However, the odds of it happening rank up (down?) there with the odds of hitting the lottery. The angle has to be just right, the force has to be just right and the timing within the recipient’s heartbeat rythm has to be just right. Probably some planetary alignment or unnatural relationships between cats and dogs involved as well.
ATA recently made chest protectors mandatory in sparring. We’ve never had an incident of CC in 35 years, but it was forced on us by our insurance carrier. Seems they also covered a youth baseball league in which a teenager was killed by a pitch that hit him in the chest.
