Difference between getting wounded and getting shot
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AUTHOR: CONNOR NARCISOCONNOR NARCISO
SCIENCE
12.08.1507:00 AM
WHAT REALLY HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET SHOT
Shooting HandgunGETTY IMAGES
STAFF SERGEANT NICK Lavery wasn’t only the most physically imposing Green Beret on our team, he was the most physically imposing soldier any of us had ever seen. He was 6′5″, approaching 280 pounds, and cut like a linebacker—the position at which he excelled, not coincidentally, as a college football player at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He was a weapons specialist, and an expert in hand-to-hand combatives. If Army scientists and tattoo artists had highjacked a Darpa lab to create the ultimate soldier, they would have created Nick. But that wouldn’t prevent a single gunshot to the leg from nearly killing him.
Most of what we learn about gunshot wounds, we learn from watching television. A small sliver of this programming is actually educational, like the ballistics tests performed on Mythbusters. (Some lessons: Bullets fired into liquids will stop or disintegrate rather than slice through seawater à la Saving Private Ryan, and a weapon that would blow a victim backwards would also blow the shooter back.) But these examples are outliers. Depictions of gun violence in fictional shows and movies are routine, and often wildly imaginative. Those depictions are distorting understanding of what bullets can—or can’t—do to bodies.