Seeing as I cannot edit, delete, or re-arrange posts on this Board, it’s not my fault that my additional warning was not placed before that link.
I know dude… relax.
Hmm with your ammount of posts i think you should be a mod at anyrate
Would a 3 gram projectile moving at nearly Mach 4 be close enough? It’s called a .220 Swift, it’s been around for decades, and it’s mighty rough on groundhogs and prairie dogs.
Me? Naw. I don’t know anything about message Boards. Not a thing.
Quadgop said: "Also, if the hydrostatic shock is great enough, a bullet wound to the hand will also kill. Certain weaponry and ammo is designed specifically to kill when impacting on extremities."
Max Torque said: "…This means that when a bullet hits your body, which is basically an upright sack of mostly water, there are far-reaching effects as hydro-shock waves radiate outward from the source of impact. It is possible for a bullet that hits an arm or a leg to cause far-reaching effects, including organ failure."
Dr. Fackler thinks otherwise, see:
http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/Fackler/wrong.html/URL
The article seems to be authoritative, is well referenced and I found his arguments convincing, particularly the point about the lithotripter.
Dr. Fackler is a fool. Please suggest to me another single factor other than kinetic energy that a bullet striking a target can impart. Or, put another way, try beating someone to death with a bullet you hold in your hand. Let me know how it turns out.
A human body is not 100% water. Significant parts contain a quantity of air, methane etc.. After a bullet passes through a body it still has a large part of the kinetic energy it started with. Only a part of the kinetic energy has been transferred to the body. At least that’s what this overeducated nonscientist thinks.
Btw, when I try to click matt’s link I get
Not Found
The requested URL /cdn-firearms/Fackler/wrong.html/URL was not found on this server.
Apache/1.3.22 Server at teapot.usask.ca Port 80
I think matt screwed up. Try the link after hacking off the tail-end “/URL.” It works.
Yep, I screwed up the link.
http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/Fackler/wrong.html
I’m not really qualified to discuss wound ballistics, but I can see why straight K.E. could be an oversimplification. Consider the damage caused by someone taking a home-run swing at your torso with a baseball bat, and then doing the same thing with a samaurai sword of equal weight and balance. The same amount of energy is transferred to your body each time, but one has a far greater wounding effect.
Alternatively, consider the energy absorbed when a 165 lb person jumps down a distance of 5 ft onto a hard surface. 827 ft-lbs absorbed by the legs - roughly the same energy as a couple of hot 9mm Parabellum.
Or to really labor the point, if somone tips a litre of water at 50 deg. C onto you, instantly cooling the water by one degree through heat transfer, results in 4200 J of energy transferred to you, or about 3100 foot-lbs. And it will harm you not at all. Energy by itself does not necessarily convert to damage.
"Please suggest to me another single factor other than kinetic energy that a bullet striking a target can impart"
Punching a hole through a person?
Which can be achieved with a fairly low amount of energy. A flat-tipped bolt from a powerful crossbow would do it.
Dr. Fackler is most certainly not a fool. He’s a learned physician with decades of research into ballistics, bullets, and the terminal effects of bullets on humans. He is also partisan, aggressive, arogant, and has gored a number of sacred oxen in the shooting world, making him rather unpopular in many circles.
Bullets kill by perfroming work in the victim. KE is converted to work within the body, disrupting tissue, and producing the kinds of effects that Qadgop was so kind as to list. All other things being equal, the more KE a bullet possess, the more work it may potentially do. However, things are almost never ‘equal’ in the shooting world. You have two general categories of wound channel in tissue: The Perminant Wound Channel, and the Temorary Wound Channel. The size of the PWC seems to be the single most direct predictor of lethality in bullet wounds. High velocity bullets tend to create large TWCs. They sometimes also produce large PWCs, but not always. The TWC is energy wasted in stretching tissue, but not necessarily disrupting it, unless you hit relatively solid tissue like a kidney or the liver, in which case you may stretch the organ beyond the limits of it’s elasticity, and tear it to pieces.
Bone hits create secondary fragmentation, creating more PWCs, and greatly enhancing the effect of the wound. Expanding bullets are intended (they don’t always work) to increase the amount of energy deposited to the tissue, increasing the amount of energy available for work, and thereby generally increasing the wounding potential of a bullet. Bullets that fragment also generally do a better job of converting KE to work, creating larger and more complex PWCs. Most bullets aren’t actually designed to do that, but some still do anyway. The M193 and M855 US issue 5.56 NATO have been demonstrated to fragment quite reliably, despite that not being the intention of the designs. German 5.56 NATO and 7.62 NATO also fragment quite often. High-energy bullets that over-penetrate waste much of their wounding potential by carrying on after leaving the victim, as do armor-piercing rounds, sometimes leaving the victim with a nice, neat hole punched through them, especially in the case of simple muscle wounds.
As for the old “Hydrostatic Shock” saw, well that’s almost entirely myth (sorry, Qadgop). It’s the work done by tearing and disrupting tissue (and the subsequent bleeding & shock) that kills. Even if something were to strike a hand with the energy necessary to create the kinds of pressure pulses necessary to disrupt vital life processes, it would never reach the torso to have it’s fatal way… It would blow a hole right through the hand and keep on going, having delivered only the smallest fraction of it’s potential energy. Lets asume, for argument’s sake that that small fractin was still potentially fatal… What happens next…? The hand blows to pieces, the fatal pressures having exceeded the limbs ability to contain it, and that’s all you have: An amputation, albeit a messy one.
Yikes!
Tranquilis:
Saying that bullets kill by performing work in the victim is precisely my point – the kinetic energy the bullet contains is absorbed by the victim, i.e. expended in work or, in this case, damage. The more KE, the more potential damage – BUT, the point I was making is that the damage is maximized when the KE absorbed is maximized.
matt:
Your energy examples are interesting, but not very applicable in this discussion. A bullet striking a body is an instance of hundreds or thousands of foot-pounds of energy being applied almost instantly and concentrated in a relatively tiny area. I’m sure that, given the time and inclination, along with the right data, I could demonstrate the equality of a fart and a cutting torch, but rather than waste my time, I’ll just come right out and sat that I’d opt for anyone’s farts rather than subject any part of my body to a cutting torch for any length of time.
As a hunter and shooter of many years’ experience, I can attest first-hand that a bullet that does not exit the target is much more likely to kill, and to do so much more quickly, than one that leaves the scene. And obviously, the bullet that stays in the target has spent its KE completely.
Like I said, I’m not really qualified for this discussion. I’ve just read a lot of Fackler’s online articles, quite a few opposing views, and personally I was convinced by Fackler. Even if he does foam at the mouth when talking about Marshall and Sanow.
My primary dispute is not about energy, but about hydrostatic shock, particularly the contention that a bullet wound to the hand can kill through hydrostatic shock. If that were really so, all those poor fools who have lost fingers or hands to homemade detonators should be dead.
"As a hunter and shooter of many years’ experience, I can attest first-hand that a bullet that does not exit the target is much more likely to kill, and to do so much more quickly, than one that leaves the scene. And obviously, the bullet that stays in the target has spent its KE completely."
"Saying that bullets kill by performing work in the victim is precisely my point – the kinetic energy the bullet contains is absorbed by the victim, i.e. expended in work or, in this case, damage"
Precisely, and you, me Tranquilis and Fackler are all on the same page here! Energy that is converted to damage is the important factor. Everyone agrees that energy is lost in flight, and everyone agrees that energy is lost in overpenetration.
Fackler’s point is that energy can also be wasted creating temporary shock cavity in elastic tissue, in which case that energy is converted to heat well distributed within the body, which is not damaging. Only in bullets that create very large temporary shock cavities such as soft-pointed hunting rounds, or bullets that create temporary shock cavities in combination with fragmentation (such as the M193 and M855 US issue 5.56 NATO) is energy transfer reliably reflected in the amount of damage caused.
Another Fackler article that might interest you is linked below, although I suggest you mute the sound before clicking on it (nasty MIDI tune.)
http://www.fen-net.de/norbert.arnoldi/army/wound.html
If you scroll down to the comparison between the US 7.62 NATO and the German 7.62 NATO (fig 7) you will see something interesting. The US round creates a large temporary shock cavity is likely to inflict significant damage with a torso hit. But the shock cavity only forms after ~16 cm into a soft target, when the bullet starts to yaw. So if the thing hit a limb, it would have a good chance of overpenetrating leaving a piddly sub-calibre wound channel.
The German round on the other hand has a steel jacket with a thinner cannelure and tends to fragment after ~8cm, making a messy exit wound in a limb and a real hamburger of a torso. Same bullet energy, same size and weight, same terminal energy, possibly even similar energy transfer for a torso hit, but different amounts of damage.