The St. Valentine’s Day massacre…I wondered if the gangsters really rubbed their bullets in garlic. The idea was that if the bullets didn’t kill their enemies, the garlic would get in their blood stream and poison them. Having gotten garlic juice in an open cut while cooking, I can tell you it hurts and so this theory seems plausible.
Quoting: “Fifty-fifty lethality isn’t very impressive, so to be safe we’d better double that to 18 grams. While that may not seem like much, a .38-caliber bullet weighs on the order of 10 grams. Could you pack 18 grams of garlic juice into one somehow? Conceivably, but then what you’ve got isn’t so much a garlic-coated bullet as a ballistic garlic delivery system.”
Wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that you wouldn’t need to get 18g of garlic onto one bullet but rather, an average 2g onto 9 bullets? After all, if you use a machine guns it wouldn’t have to be a one-shot deal.
So…if you use a machine gun and pump 9 slugs into someone, it’s the garlic on them that’s the danger? I fear you may need to reconsider the mechanics involved.
I also would have to say that something hurting when rubbed into an open cut is not translatable to it being a lethal or even hazardous poison.
Granted, 9 slugs as direct hits, well…no question. But I doubt the gangsters calculated any sort of lethal dose anyway. Just pointing out that we can’t say one bullet had to carry the full load. How would you feel about six grams on three bullets? Or maybe as they lose blood, the effective concentration of garlic would rise. Maybe after losing blood, being weakened, they couldn’t tolerate as much garlic.
Actually, I didn’t know I had a cut until the garlic got into it. Yikes! If you’ve never experienced this, I’ll invite you to make a pinprick, get just a little garlic juice on it, and see if it doesn’t hurt out of all proportion to your expectations.
Or maybe I’m extraordinarily sensitive to it.
I swear, as I typed this, the TV program about the massacre JUST mentioned the rubbing of garlic on the bullets.
On a related note, if you read Asbury’s The Gangs of New York there is mention about 3/4 of the way through (sorry, on the road and don’t have my books) of a gangster who used to dip his bullets in garlic under a belief it would add to their lethality.
Or maybe as they lose blood, the effective concentration of garlic would rise. Maybe after losing blood, being weakened, they couldn’t tolerate as much garlic.