Must Read: A Radiologist explains why AR-15s aren't like other guns

[catbyte]

What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns

Heather Sher 10:26 AM ET

As I opened the CT scan last week to read the next case, I was baffled. The history simply read “gunshot wound.” I have been a radiologist in one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation for 13 years, and have diagnosed thousands of handgun injuries to the brain, lung, liver, spleen, bowel, and other vital organs. I thought that I knew all that I needed to know about gunshot wounds, but the specific pattern of injury on my computer screen was one that I had seen only once before.

In a typical handgun injury that I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ like the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, grey bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, with extensive bleeding. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?

The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle which delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.

A year ago, when a gunman opened fire at the Fort Lauderdale airport with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, hitting 11 people in 90 seconds, I was also on call. It was not until I had diagnosed the third of the six victims who were transported to the trauma center that I realized something out-of-the-ordinary must have happened. The gunshot wounds were the same low velocity handgun injuries as those I diagnose every day; only their rapid succession set them apart. And all six of the victims who arrived at the hospital that day survived.

Routine handgun injuries leave entry and exit wounds and linear tracks through the victim's body that are roughly the size of the bullet. If the bullet does not directly hit something crucial like the heart or the aorta, and they do not bleed to death before being transported to our care at a trauma center, chances are, we can save the victim. The bullets fired by an AR-15 are different; they travel at higher velocity and are far more lethal. The damage they cause is a function of the energy they impart as they pass through the body. A typical AR-15 bullet leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster than, and imparting more than three times the energy of, a typical 9mm bullet from a handgun. An AR-15 rifle outfitted with a magazine cartridge with 50 rounds allows many more lethal bullets to be delivered quickly without reloading.

..........snip

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/

[exboyfil]

1. And it only takes a few seconds to reload

Not enough time to jump the shooter as many propose.

Still a semiautomatic handgun can be nearly as dangerous. See Virginia Tech for example. Someone with two semiautomatic handguns can fire 30 to 40 rounds in the same amount of time as a someone with a rifle.

[Moostache]

2. Descriptions are a start...SHOW THE EFFECTS

Make America confront the complicity of not DEMANDING this end, of not shaming the grifters and sociopaths who want MORE access to this weaponry and not less.

Too few people in this country read ANYTHING, and fewer still will see or read this piece...its time for Facebook, Twitter, and the rest to pay their debt to society...change the banners and wall papers to show a healthy organ and one torn apart by an AR-15...show the exit wounds and destroyed bodies....quit hiding the carnage and force it to be viewed, absorbed, assimilated and ENDED.

Anything short of that and we already know how this latest outrage and protest ends....with NOTHING CHANGED.

Sandy Hook killed our soul as a nation. We did not act then, and without massive prompting and drastic actions - that are admittedly gruesome and extreme like broadcasting video of gun shot wounds - nothing is what we are on a glide path to getting again.

Protests by the MILLIONS did not stop the Iraq War.
Protesters by the THOUSANDS after Sandy Hook did not change gun access or ammunition...

Pulse? Nothing...
San Bernadino? Nothing...
Las Vegas? Nothing...

I expect the pattern to hold unless the narrative is disrupted and forced into confronting the truth - in all of its stomach turning, grotesque gore and horror.

If not? Nothing...

[TheMastersNemesis]

3. Certainly Confirms What I Know. The Dying VC Were Not Saveable.

If you are hit in a limb most likely it will be gone or so badly damaged is cannot be saved. Traumatic amputation is one result of being hit by a .223.

[napi21]

4. I'm sure no expert on guns, but I've been told the AR is designed to have the bullets

tumble once it penetrates the body thus delivering the maximum damage. I'm fighting to have them banned for civilian possession. I also think we should change what we are calling them. There was a battle with the opponents of gun control last time we tried to ban them regarding just what we designate an "ASSAULT WEAPON". I say we call them "War Weapons". That's what they are! Designed specifically for our military use in war!