casingpoint wrote:I've seen a whole lot of gunshot wounds.
Let me as you and old farmer to estimate out of all the hollow point handgun wounds you have seen, what percentage involved bullets which expanded to a significant degree?
I honestly don't know the degree of expansion for most of them. Probably 65%-75% of the GSWs I saw were from a .22LR bullet — that being the apparent caliber of choice at the time for the Pasadena Knife and Gun Club. Most of the rest were either hardball of various calibers from .25 ACP up to .45 ACP, or lead round nose or semi-wadcutters in .38 Special. Almost all were from pistols. I think I didn't see more than 5 or 6 people shot with rifles in all that time. I remember that one was a 12 year old boy shot through the aorta point blank with a .22 rifle. He died. I remember a woman who had a devastating wound from a .223 bullet falling out of the sky, and I remember another guy who was shot in the head by accident with a .30 caliber rifle bullet. But I saw hundreds of guys shot with pistols — at least one or two a week (sometimes more), times 52 weeks in a year, times almost 6 years.
I worked in that ER from 1979 to 1985, and both the range of available bullet choices and the buyer's sophistication of the typical Californian gang-banger were probably limited compared to today. The first hollowpoint wound I ever saw was actually self-inflicted by a friend of mine who was a Pasadena cop. It was a +P .38 Special hollowpoint, bullet weight unknown to me, but I'm guessing that it was probably whatever was standard fare for LEOs back then who carried .38s. Steve was on patrol as a training officer (to his embarrassment) with a rookie in the car with him when it happened. It was probably around 10:00 to 10:30 p.m., and he was stopped at a red light. He just happened to look in his side mirror in time to see some guy jump out of his car about 4 cars back in the lane and rush forward to Steve's car on the driver's side. Steve drew his weapon inside the patrol car and kind of tucked it under his left armpit, out of sight but available if necessary. It turned out the other guy just wanted directions. When Steve was reholstering his revolver, it discharged point blank high into his right thigh. The bullet hit nothing but skin and muscle, and exited on the inside of his right knee, continued at a slight downward angle, hit the firewall, and ricocheted upward into the radio equipment behind the dashboard, where it did nobody any favors.
Other than a nasty infection caused by pieces of holster and clothing having been blown into the wound cavity which required 2 or 3 days of IV antibiotics, he was fine. I never saw the bullet itself, but Steve told me later that it was pretty mangled. The rookie who was in the car with him was shaken, but performed admirably. Several of us from the ER staff were in the radio room waiting for an expected call from a paramedic ambulance that was rolling on another call, and our scanner picked up the radio call from the rookie, saying he had an officer down and needed help. Steve told me the next morning when I visited him in his hospital room that while he was laying on the ground waiting for the ambulance to show up, he told the rookie, "What I just did there... ...don't do
that!"
All of that is to say that the exit wound, while marginally larger than the entrance wound, was not dramatically larger, and
nothing like the wounds in the above pictures. The only other patients I saw that I know were shot with hollowpoints both had through and through wounds from a .41 magnum, and they were actually home invasion robbers who had their gun taken away from them by a former Green Beret who happened to be upstairs at the time they kicked in the door. He confronted one of the BGs at the top of the stairs, disarmed him and kicked his butt 6 times before he hit the ground, threw him down the stairs and shot him twice on the way down, killing him. He then ran down the stairs and shot the other BG who was slapping his old mother around downstairs.
The first BG was DOA. One of the bullets had hit him in the upper arm, breaking his humerus. The second bullet hit him right over the heart in front and exited through his right kidney in the back. The kidney had been pretty much vaporized. The exit hole was about the size of the lower wound in the above photo, except that it was at a much deeper angle, and you can imagine that it had pretty much destroyed every organ in its path.
The second BG survived about a week. He was hit twice in the left flank, both bullets passing through his abdomen and exiting on the far side. It basically turned his digestive tract into menudo, and he suffered terribly before dying of a massive infection. The sizes of the exit wounds on the second guy were significant, but not nearly as dramatic as the one on the other guy. I don't know why. I assume that the bullets were all recovered, since this occurred inside a home and the police would have looked for them, but I never saw them. I can only
assume that they were hollowpoints because the exit wounds were so much larger than the entrance wounds.
Also, at that particular time in my life, I had a completely different take on guns than I have now. I was raised in a family of liberal academics, and my attitudes were typical of that culture. Consequently, I didn't know all that much about guns at the time (except that they were eeeeeeeeeevil), and I knew next to nothing about bullet technology except that I knew the difference between an FMJ and a JHP. But it would have never occurred to me at the time to be interested in the degree of bullet expansion. I was more focused on the damage the bullet caused, and on my duties as part of the team that took care of people who had been shot. The ER I worked in was also a level 1 trauma center, but this was 30 years ago, and I'm sure that both the state of the art and the technology available today are much higher than they were back then. Old Farmer can probably better answer the question of degree of expansion than I can.
I only know that hollowpoints work.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
Thankee, thankee.
