Judging from Post editor Sally Buzbee’s introduction to the project, as well as from my own reporting, the paper talked to dozens of survivors and family members and weighed the enormous range of their opinions about this issue to craft the feature. It was so much better than I was expecting that it initially blinded me to the way it was bad. But bad in a kind of routine way: The media, as well as certain kinds of activists, believe we need to be presented with graphic, grisly evidence to grasp what are simply facts. This grisly evidence, they posit, will change hearts and minds.
It will not. Upwards of three-quarters of American voters support almost every commonsense gun law. And we know why political leaders haven’t heeded their call: the gun lobby, and its disgusting political servants. But the Post tried, anyway, with its multimedia “Terror on Repeat” project. I won’t impugn these journalists’ motives. I’ll assume they are good. I’ll just tell you what I saw, and why I would like to spare people seeing the same thing. Especially survivors.
Bullet wounds from an AR-15 (.223 or 5.56) typically look much cleaner than wounds from a larger handgun bullet, especially a hollow point.
A rifle round just goes straight through pretty cleanly. A 9mm round from a handgun is nearly twice as large as 5.56mm so the bullet hole is twice as large, and because it’s a less aerodynamic shape (and designed specifically to expand and impart the most force into the target) leaves much nastier wounds.
This ER doctor who has treated many different gun wounds says you’re wrong.
Someone needs to read up on hydrostatic shock.
I love guns and oppose all bans, but let’s not pretend that rifle rounds are less deadly because they’re smaller caliber. 9mm Luger wasn’t designed to drop a deer at 100 yards.
The 5.56 mm high velocity rifle round tends to fragment though, creating multiple wound channels pointing in different directions from the impact point. This makes it very dangerous despite its small size, and has high kinetic energy due to the velocity squared term.
It does need some distance after impacting flesh to fragment like this, but when it happens it can be catastrophic if it hits critical organs or arteries.
It’s almost as if the army tried to make the 5.56 bullet more effective at killing enemy soldiers. But now I’ve learnt that they wanted to create clean, non-deadly wounds.
/s in case it’s not obvious.
That’s just straight up not true. 5.56, especially steel core is designed to penetrate bulletproof armor. You aren’t penetrating bulletproof armor if you fragment hitting skin or bone.
You’ve got them switched. It’s hollow point handgun ammo that isn’t supposed to fragment, but can depending on the quality of the ammo and what it hits can. A defective hollow point will do exactly what you’ve described.
5.56 mm FMJ ammo can
, and has increasing chance of fragmentation at higher terminal velocities. This is also particularly exacerbated when striking bone. Both M855 and M193 steel core rounds exhibit this effect.
The mild steel penetrator on M855 “green tip” ammunition enhances penetration on hard targets, but is not an AP (armor piercing) ammunition. It will go through level IIIa (soft) armor, but so will pretty much any rifle bullet other than .22lr. It should not go through level III armor, and definitely not level IV.
The older M193 ammunition (pre-1980) was what really tended to tumble and fragment, and that’s the most common range ammo in use today; a 55gr FMJ BT.
That’s… Just not accurate.
Okay, so, to start, you have a temporary wound channel, and a permanent wound channel. The temporary wound channel is cause by the pressure from a bullet trying to displace blood and tissue at high speed. Below about 2600fps, the tissue around the path of the bullet will blow open, but then snap back into place, because muscle, fat, etc., are a little elastic. Pistol rounds will overcome that by being large to start (9mm v. 5.56mm), and by being designed to expand to up to about 2x their original size.
OTOH, above about 2600fps, blood and tissue are being displaced so fast that it overcomes the elasticity of the tissue, causing permanent tearing in a much larger channel than the path the bullet itself is creating. So a much smaller bullet moving at a higher speed will create a larger permanent wound channel than a slower–but larger bullet.
Most intermediate and larger cartridges–typically rifle cartridges (other than .22, or rifles firing pistol calibers)–will go faster than 2600fps. Very, very few handguns are able to go 2600fps.
5.56 specifically does some weird things ballistically when it hits at ranges under about 200y; the bullets tend to fragment and yaw. Past about 400y, once they’ve dropped some speed, they’ll ‘ice-pick’, where it’s just a clean hole going straight through.
Full size cartridges will usually have some pretty gnarly exit wounds. It’s not ‘blow your lungs out’–which is the second dumbest thing Biden has said about guns–but it’s definitely far, far worse to get hit by a .308 Win than a 9mm. All other things being equal, you’re much more likely to die if you’re shot by a rifle than a handgun.
FBI studies show that only only .22s have significantly lower mortality rate. Mortality rates are more or less the same for other rounds when I read the study.
So I guess that makes the trauma all right, then?