There’s a fairly common TV trope where someone gets shot, usually in an extremity and usually a cop, and the cop’s buddy looks at the arm and says “You’re going to be OK. It’s a clean wound. It went all the way through.”
Is it actually better to have an entry and an exit wound? From what I’ve seen, exit wounds are usually pretty large and just intuitively, I’d rather be bleeding out of one hole than two.
Is there any truth to this trope?
I’m guessing it means it went through flesh (muscle/skin) only, no shattered bones or leaking organs. And a non-hollowpoint bullet would leave relatively little damage.
Bullet wounds are serious business. You are unlikely to be “okay” after suffering one.
That said, the bullet being embedded in your flesh can cause further damage, and usually needs to be removed to prevent infection or sepsis.
It sounds more like what a doctor would determine in the ER, seeing that they do not have to cause potentially more trauma to extract the foreign body, than a lucky break that will let you keep on fighting against the big bad.
I mean obviously it depends on the location of the bullet but if it’s not in a vital organ or something don’t doctors generally just leave them where they are, I know sometimes they come out on their own, even years later.
A bullet going through also means that it didn’t deposit all of its energy in the person’s body. This matters, because damage is roughly proportional to energy.
32 years ago a classmate suffered a bullet would in his deltoid. Bullet went right through, did not hit bone. The amount of blood was pretty sickening. We got him to a hospital in 30-45 minutes (there were checkpoints we had to avoid). He had lost a LOT of blood, the back seat and floor of the car were soaked as were his and another student’s clothes. He has never recovered the full use of his arm.
The bullet was fired from some kind of Klashnikov or knock-off. We were caught in a firefight between the “student” wings of two ethno-religious political parties in Pakistan.
I always find these fictional depictions of “flesh wounds” as no bid deal to be ridiculous, based on this one real life experience. Maybe it’s different if it’s a handgun bullet or a different angle of attack.
Even intermediate calibers liek the AK’s 7.62-39 is so much more dangerous than pistol ones. A .32ACP hitting in the same place would have been as bad.
Yes, although it depends on the ‘bullet’. Lead shot was normally left: shell fragments were removed unless it was difficult, because the jagged edges of shell fragments continue to cause further damage.
Clothing fragments, dirt, dead bits of flesh, need to be removed to prevent infection and sepsis. Gunpowder residue needs to be removed to prevent tattooing. Bullets? meh. That’s a Hollywood trope.
Exit wounds are particularly large when they blow a whole ton of bone fragments out the back side. Turns a rifle round into a semi shotgun out the back.
Another option is the bullet deforming when hitting bone. It goes in sharp and smooth and comes out a jagged blunt metal anchor.
Yep - and it’s awfully overplayed a lot of the time - the victim is conspicuously ‘dying’ as the (often unqualified/amateur/veterinary) surgeon rummages around to try to extract the bullet; then the moment we hear the bullet go ‘plink’ into the kidney bowl, the victim is abruptly no longer dying of too many gunshots.
A friend of mine was shot by travellers in France (his party mistook the traveller’s site for a campsite and started setting up their tent) - a ball of buckshot entered the back/side of his neck, luckily missing anything very important, and ended up lodged in the root of his tongue; they left it there because surgery to remove it would do more damage.
My patients extrude bullets regularly. Some of them were embedded for over 3 decades. The vast majority of retained bullets don’t need to be removed. And aren’t. Bullet hunting in the human body causes more problems than it cures 98% of the time. Even with fluoroscopy to guide one, those buggers are hard to locate without tearing up a lot of tissue.
What’s a “traveller”? Equivalent of US hitchhikers, or someone more inimical?
I think he means one of the itinerant (often ethnic minority) groups such as the Romani (“Gypsies”)
“It’s only a flesh wound” is an overused movie line. Considering the volume your organs, bones, and major blood vessels take up in your body then there isn’t that much flesh left to get shot through. If you are hit at all then It takes a stroke of luck for a gunshot not to hit some more critical part of the body.
“Good” to know, though I hope to have no need of this knowledge.
Yeah, something like that. I refrained from identifying them as Romani because I don’t know that they were - they may have been any other group, or individuals of no particular group just living in tents and trailers.
Responding to the OP, a “clean” exit is only for movies.
In reality, different issues are possible:
a) for small caliber, with relatively great speed, the bullet will usually not transfer a lot of energy (exception, see d) below) and can pass trough muscle, organs and skin in straight line. Bleeding is still a major concern that need medical attention asap. The only case when this trope can be played straight is if it was a near miss, only cutting skin and upper flesh.
b) for heavy caliber (musket, shotgun,…) the impact will be far more important since a greater part of the energy is transferred to the target. Expect internal damage and bleeding. In this case, the exit is not clean at all.
c) Bullets of military firearms are generally shaped so the bullet start rotating as soon as it hit something. A clear .22 as entry, a pizza as exit… Or you can have a clear entry and exit, but the path inside the body is totally unpredictable and severe damage to the organs (and bleeding) are inevitable.
d) In addition to all the cases, if the bullet hit a bone, it will send fragments through the body, causing more damages.
As often, the movies aren’t a very good source of information…
NB: this only applies to the heroes, everybody knows that villainous henchmen die as soon as the bullet hits 
Yes, the movie trope where the hero wraps a handkerchief round it, rolls a cigarette one-handed, and gets better in time for next week’s episode is not a common scenario. “He was never the same after he was shot” is something said about too many people over the years.
My brother shot me in the leg. A .22 caliber bullet lodged just under the skin of my leg just behind the knee. There was no permanent injury. The ER got it out with a pair of tweezers, cleaned the wound and put a big band aid on it. I do not think it was a direct hit. I think it bounced off of something, possibly the floor.
I teased him about it for the rest of his life.
Paul Fussell, in Doing Battle states that he was “absolutely astonished to discover just how much blood could come from a human body”.