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.
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.