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

[ffr]

They weren’t the first victims of a mass shooting the Florida radiologist had seen—but their wounds were radically different.

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. - The Atlantic

Assault weapon. Keyword, assault.

[GReedDiamond]

1. Reluctantly Recommended, the linked article is very disturbing...

...in the descriptions of the damage done by assault "style" weapons such as the AR-15.

[BigmanPigman]

2. I read that on DU this morning and it was on MSNBC too...

disgusting!!! I heard a similar description of the 6 year old kids from Sandy Hook. The classroom was just full of bits of organs and tissue...those poor, poor parents and first responders. Wayne La Pierre should be forced to see it first hand. After the concentration camps were liberated the soldiers made the German citizens who cliamed they didn't know what was going on down the road from them were forced to walk past the ditches that were full of the rotting, starved corpses. I think that was a brilliant idea.

[ffr]

3. Better still, have the media playing on the wall behind him as he speaks to NRA members.

The glamour of guns. A very covert operation to accomplish.

[BigmanPigman]

4. When was this made?

[ffr]

5. I don't know, it was posted by Saviolo two days again in Video & Multimedia

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1017481185

You might ask him.

[pansypoo53219]

7. i stopped watching crime drama. not that neat or smart. most stupid.

no longer amused.

[loyalsister]

6. So, say this shooting could not have been entirely prevented

I sometimes hear an assumption that the only worthwhile regulations are those that would completely prevent this kind of attack. It wouldn't be perfect, but I would welcome a policy that could improve the chance that more of these victims would survive.
It should not be so easy to kill people much less to leave behind the kind of canage these guns inflict.