I can only cite the lateness of the hour, good beer, and bad eyesight as my excuse for missing you… my apologies. Welcome aboard, KCSuze!
Bit of a hijack, really :
I should mention that I am also an ex-Marine, and perhaps your coworker is only trying to impress you. I’ve known quite a few Marines who would talk that way for that reason. To borrow a Navy phrase, the only difference between a fairy tale and a “sea story” is that fairy tales begin “once upon a time…” and sea stories begin “Now this ain’t no shit…”
Welcome to the boards. Uh… basically tell him that anything that goes through the brain that’s the size of a bullet is going to kill except in extremely rare cases, where the guy is turned into a vegetable.
SenorBeef–interestingly enough, he did mention that the best way to kill someone is to shoot them at the very top of the spine with the barrel pointing upwards toward the skull. He said that way, the bullet severs the spinal cord and enters the brain. Is this true?
I imagine the best way to kill someone would probably involve hacking the said person into chunks no larger than 2cm and then burning the chunks until hey are a fine ash. Any method that leaves a person in less than 5 pieces cannot guarentee they are dead IMHO :D.
I’m not positive, but it certainly sounds reasonable. The most efficient way to kill with a gun is to cripple the central nervous system, and shooting in a way that will destroy parts of the spine and brain seems ideal.
IIRC, wood cored bullets have a tendency to shatter and splinter off into the body, causing nasty internal bleeding and often infection. For some reason, the body has a harder time adjusting to tiny wood fragments in itself as compared to metal, I think. Also, doctors have a hard time removing the fragments because they won’t show up on an x-ray.
Another Person wanting to know what is so bad about a wooden core bullet.
Only wooden bullets i can find out about are ( what appear ( to my -useless- brain) to be) training bullets. A small story about a wood-core bullet being used to kills some swedish seargent in a training exercise. Apparently they couldn’t find the killer because teh bullet disintegrated, but no details on the damage inflicted .
Anyone read the book "Black Hawk Down? In that, several of the rangers interviewed after the event complained of rounds going straight through people, leaving them still capable of firing back. It sometimes took as many as 6-10 rounds to drop some of those Somali dudes.
According to the book, the Delta guys knew about this problem and so many of them used different weapons and ammo than the rangers.
IIRC most infantry types in Viet Nam din’t do much aiming per se. Not at the headshot vs bodyshot level anyway.
At least the Marines I knew would pretty much “fill the air” with lead, as it were. And call in air/artillary support.
Snipering, now that’s a different story.
Was there any appreciable small arms combat in Desert Storm?
Space Vampire, I work in retail. Some days, getting shot in the base of the skull looks like an attractive option.
Shalmanese, chopping them into chunks…is this the voice of experience? SenorBeef, pardon my ignorance, but a bullet can go through a person and they still have the ability to fire back?
Right. Bullets do most of their damage to a person due to the shock wave produced when the bullet impacts and travels through tissue. If a bullet travels completely through a person, it does not transfer all of its available kinetic energy to the target and may do less tissue damage. (The target may ultimately die of blood loss, but this is not necessarily immediate.)
Small, high-velocity bullets are more likely to travel completely through a person than a slower larger-caliber bullet. A person hit by a bullet that completely penetrates them may take a while to bleed to death. During this time, they may be capable of shooting back. This is an argument in favor of larger caliber bullets that are more likely to “knock-down” a target; such bullets are said to have more “stopping power.”
In a related note, there was a big-debate some years ago in the FBI between those in favor of 9-mm pistols versus 0.45 caliber pistols. (The latter are larger caliber.) The biggest argument in favor of the 9-mm were larger magazine capacity. The biggest argument in favor of the 0.45 were more knock-down capability.
The critical incident was the 1986 Miami shootout in which FBI agents armed primarily with 9-mm pistols were attacked by two robbery suspects. Both of the criminals were hit numerous times (one was hit eleven times; the other six times), but they survived long enough to kill two FBI agents and wound five. Several of the bullets striking the suspects completely penetrated the suspects.
Ultimately, I believe the FBI tried to compromise between the two camps by going with the 10-mm (0.40-caliber).
Have you ever been hit with a line drive baseball or accidently hammered your thumb or cut yourself badly? It fucking hurts!!
Now I’m no expert, but I am willing to bet that any small piece of metal traveling a thousand feet per second when it hits you is going to:
a) hurt
b) damage you severely
The ex-Marines story sounds a lot like the old wives tale I heard as a child where a bullet entering your ear would follow the path of least resistance out your mouth. Both sound unlikely.
Also, simple physics dictates that a gunshot victim is not going to be “knocked down” any more than the shooter is knocked down when he fires his gun. So forget lauching people in the air with twin .45s like Antonio Banderes in Desperado.
A Google search with search terms “bullet hydrostatic shock” brings up numerous websites that support Crafter_Man’s statement. It also brings up numerous websites that support the idea of hydrostatic shock being the primary mechanism of gunshot injury.
None of the websites that I looked at appear to be what I would consider definitive or research-based. Most appear to be anecdotal or offered with no support.
This website summarizes both sides, but also presents no definitive answer:
I have to confess that I’ve heard that this was the mechanism for years, and never thought to question it.
msmith537, I don’t know if you were addressing me or robby, and if you weren’t talking to me, please disregard my babbling.
Nope. Worst injury I’ve ever had was a sprained ankle.
Well, to be truthful, I don’t have a whole lot of experience with guns and the physics thereof. I’ve never even seen one up close. That’s why I asked the question, because I don’t really have any idea about that sort of thing.
And an anecdote - my son’s friend was just discharged from inpatient rehab. He shot himself, the bullet went clear through from one ear to the other, and although he is certainly not well, he is far from a vegetable. Rare, maybe, but extremely rare, and the outcomes always being a persistive vegetative state, are overstating it a little, I think.
