Heather Sher is a radiologist at The Broward County Hospital where last week’s victims of the horrific Stoneman Douglas school shooting were taken.
In The Atlantic she describes what the Ar-15 does to the human body and how hopelessly stupid it is to expect a good guy with a pistol to do anything to stop somebody wielding one.
“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?
….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 with 50 rounds allows many more lethal bullets to be delivered quickly without reloading.”
So, a shooter with an AR-15 confronts an armed guard with a pistol.
He is likely to have 5 times as many rounds ready to fire than the guard, can fire each of them much faster and they will reach his hapless target three times as rapidly.
The assailant, well aware that he is going up against an armed guard, will probably be wearing a Kevlar vest, necessitating the guard to make a difficult head shot in order to stop him in his tracks. While the guard is taking careful aim, the assailant can fire off five or six rounds in the guard’s general direction, any one of which, if it strikes his target, will instantly incapacitate him.
If our idiot President does not know this, then his feckless babysitters, “his” generals must, which means they are being derelict in their duty to let him propagate such nonsense.
I highly recommend reading Dr. Sher’s column, I cannot do it justice observing fair use.