In this thread, an armed looney goes on a rampage at a college. Sounds like he injured around 20 people, with 3 or so dead as yet.
When I hear of such incidents (in addition to sadness, disgust, sympathy, etc) I’m always a mite surprised that the casualty rates are not higher than they are, and that the number of dead is so much lower than the number of wounded. I am not a gun person myself, but in my ignorance it seems to me that if a person went into a heavily populated area like a school or restaurant with automatic weapons and plenty of ammo, intending to kill as many people as possible, it really shouldn’t be too difficult to ring up considerably more than 20 killed and wounded.
I imagine in many cases, like a disaffected employee, they really only want to take out a few specific victims. But in other cases is it that these gunmen don’t really want a maximum casualty count? Is it simply harder to hit moving targets at close range? Are they stopped before they can shoot more? Do they experience equipment malfunctions? Do they not have a plan? Etc.
I’m guessing that it’s harder to kill a person than people seem to think it is. On TV and in the movies if you shoot someone , they fall down, speak a few inspiring last words, and die.
Having shot more than a few deer in my life, which have about the same weight as a person and similar internal organs, I can tell you that unless you are shot in a really vital organ, you can live quite a while and people have the benefit of ambulances and doctors.
I don’t know if this lunatic was using a handgun or not, but if he was, that could be part of it too. People that don’t practice shooting handguns tend to be really bad shots and grossly overestimate the effective range of their weapon.
A lot of these shooters just ‘shoot’. Most of them (with the exception of snipers on rooftops) just shoot at anything, hoping they hit something. You have people moving and what the military would call the ‘fog of war’, so much going on at once.
My guess is also that some of the people who are injured from gunshot wounds receive their wounds from ricocheted bullets, where the trajectory from the bullet is not the original shooting point and the round has time to slow down.
A lot of the people in the shooters point of aim also are moving pretty quick the second they hear the gun shooting, making it harder for the targets to be, well, targeted.
Also, if the ammunition used are small caliber arms, it lowers the risk of ‘serious’ impact. This is not to say that a small .22 caliber round can not cause death, but it is minimized compared to a .556 round from an AK-47 or a M16 (AR15 for civilians).
Most people can’t hit a broad side of a barn under stress, even cops. Even when aiming.
If you just took a fully automatic assault rifle with a 30 round magazine, went into a crowded room and held down the trigger the magazine would be emptied in between 1 to 3 seconds. Most of those 30 rounds will be in walls/furniture/ceiling/your foot, but at least one is probably going to be in the person you aimed at first - somewhere. The likelihood of hitting something vital is not that high.
If you still have your doubts, go to your local pistol shooting range, rent a pistol (if available in your locality) and try to hit a target at 25ft with three shots. Note that you are not moving, it is not moving and you get ample time to aim. Now if your target is not already torso-shaped, picture it in front of a fictional assailant. How many of your 3 bullet holes would’ve hit a vital organ? I’ve read somewhere (but I can’t find a cite) that people who are good shots, will on average perform about as well as an amateur who is holding a gun for the first time when under extreme stress.
Thanks for the responses.
I’ve never shot a handgun nor a long gun other than a .22 or a shotgun. And my only analogous experience is with paintball, where the accuracy/range is far less, and the setting is outside.
I guess - despite appearances, these sprees aren’t exactly the well-thought out schemes I might suspect. I always kinda think of these shooters as obsessing over whatever, which includes picking the tools, becoming familiar with them, sellecting the setting and their approach, etc.
Hell, if they gave it as much thought and planning as I do an upcoming golf game, or my teenager son does to asking a girl out…
An “automatic weapon” means a machine gun. AFAIK exactly NONE of the “looney on a rampage” scenerios involved an automatic weapon.
Ownership of such has has been heavilly regulated since 1934, and in that time there appear to have been exactly two homocides involving leagally owned machine guns:
As other respondants have noted, a loony on a bell tower with a bolt action rifle, firing slowly, and aiming carefully will probably kill more people than the loony with a high capacity semi-auto employing a “spray and pray” strategy.
An “automatic weapon” means a machine gun. AFAIK exactly NONE of the “looney on a rampage” scenerios involved an automatic weapon.
Ownership of such has has been heavilly regulated since 1934, and in that time there appear to have been exactly two homocides involving leagally owned machine guns:
As other respondants have noted, a loony on a bell tower with a bolt action rifle, firing slowly, and only emtying a 5 shot magazine, while aiming carefully will probably kill more people than the loony with a high capacity semi-auto employing a “spray and pray” strategy.
From what little I know of Bryant, he is pretty dysfunctional. The perpetrator of the recent shootings in Montreal was probably normal, if angry and depressed, and no doubt the enormity of what he was doing would have effected his aim due to extreme stress as groman and others suggest. I suspect Bryant would have been (in comparison) cool as a cucumber, because he is a psychopath who is only really able to think about himself, and would have been quite disconnected from the enormity of what he was doing.
In military engagements you typically also see far more wounded than injured, and very few of either for the rounds expended. Granted, people tend to be firing back in those situations but I think it’s still down to the fact that shooting people is much more difficult than anyone would think who hasn’t tried it. Soldiers spend a lot of time training, are very familiar with their weapons, and still often struggle to hit the broad side of a barn.
Groman, I don’t have a cite, but I know he’s right. Medical examiner homicide loads even twenty years ago were much heavier than they are today. Right now homicides make up about 130 of the 630 autopsies my office does a year. When I was a fellow twelve years ago, they made up a quarter. We hear all the time about people shot and down in our jurisdiction, who go to the local major trauma center, and never come to us. We bless them every day for it. Thank you trauma care people for lightening our workload!!!
I was also a surgical resident twenty years ago, and I remember the ceaseless effort of research by trauma surgeons and for trauma surgeons on new and better ways to save people. I remember the constant enrolling of sick ICU patients after trauma in studies that compared one antibiotic or wound dressing to another.
There have been two major changes in surgical technique in the last twenty years, one of which doesn’t affect trauma much. That is laparoscopic surgery, which has revolutionized elective surgery. Most trauma is still slice’em open down the midline, though, so let’s ignore that. The other major technique change has been stapling instead of sewing sutures. I don’t just mean staples down the incision though those exist. I mean the complicated devices that, for instance, take two cut ends of bowel such as used to require twenty minutes of careful tiny stitching, and somehow suck both ends together and staple them inside and out with a hundred rows of tiny staples that never come apart. The less time you spend on the OR table, the more likely you are to get off it alive.
Technique aside, the major changes have come about in diagnosis through CT and MRI and many other techniques, and in administration of fluids, blood, antibiotics, and ways of measuring what’s going on in the body to fine-tune care. What we do, and when and how we do it. Those have been huge. They have all come out of research such as I mentioned.
