This tweet showed up on my feed and it pissed me off. My response came pouring out in one long rant. It’s a Very Graphic Description of what bullets do inside our bodies and not at all for the squeamish. (Although having no actual formal medical training myself, it involved a lot of guesswork. But seriously, I am so sick of these assholes.)
“Just the sight of a gun causes some people to hyperventilate in fear. It's just ridiculous. I don't know where that perception comes from, but it's based on nothing but propaganda & ignorance of who gun owners are and why it's important that we have the right to own guns.”
I think a lot of it has to do with how delicate things are inside the body, once you get past the dermal and epidermal layers you'll find all sorts of tissues and membranes that perform literally existentially important functions & simply aren't designed for any (cont.)
..intrusion into the body at all, let alone high velocity lead & shrapnel. The membrane keeping your cerebral spinal fluid inside it's sac is vitally important, there's a lot of it, following the spine and providing the fluid bath your brain rests in. Even small tears, (cont.)
...easily achieved by a bullet or tiny piece of one, will immediately start your spinal fluid draining into your body cavity, and while not high-pressure like blood, it's gravity fed, so the damage that gets done first is at the top end of the system, the most important (cont.)
..part: the brain. So even with a non life-threatening wound below, your brain, deprived of this vitally important buffer, will begin resting on actual surface. It won't "rattle", but same effect - blinding pain & permanent damage across a spectrum of ways can ensue, and (cont.)
.re-filling CSR isn't easy, fast or available the way blood transfusions are. Fortunately with younger children the brain is more "plastic" for want of a better word, it can heal better for kids under 5 or so, but because their bodies are smaller, chances are anything (cont)
.rupturing the CSR sac probably went through the spine, or stomach, kidneys, lungs, etc. because everything's pretty close together and separated only by the flimsiest of partitions. And none of it's gonna stop a bullet. Also worth noting the damage stomach acid can do (cont.)
to other tissues & organs around it, especially the outer intestinal walls and further down (uterus, fallopian tubes etc.) if the diaphragm is ruptured. Seriously, you have no idea how powerful stomach acids are, and the huge risk of sepsis once they start burning through (cont.)
organs/digestive tract. Likewise you don't want bullets traveling in & through the coils of your upper & lower digestive tract for several reasons: the tight looping array allows a single bullet to pass through 6 or 7 layers of intestinal wall/lining following a straight (cont.)
..trajectory. That's a whole lot of tissue damage, obviously, but worse, a whole lot of what's essentially poison now let loose in places you DON'T want it. DO NOT MOVE if you're gut shot. It's not like the movies. I probably don't need to tell you about the (cont.)
heart/aortic walls being made mincemeat by lead, but the systemic pressure close by is more intense than you think, and arterial bleeding's gonna do you in much faster than you think. Pretty much anything larger or more jagged than a BB is going to collapse a lung if (cont.)
..it gets in there, and while you do have the breastplate/ribcage for protection, far too often the bone itself shatters and becomes shrapnel right where you don't want it. Hang on for a sec, I've got to take care of something and we can move on to the head and neck.
The thing with getting shot in the neck or throat is obviously the carotid artery and spinal cord/column, but also the massive nerves/nerve clusters outside of the spinal column as well. There's a mass of ganglia behind the hinge of the jaw that gets ripped into a lot (cont.)
..when the bone either shatters or is thrust violently backwards from ballistic impact. So much is packed in such a tight space in the neck that a single bullet can easily pass through/rupture a dozen different membranes/tissues/cartilage and damage/destroy numerous (cont.)
critical systems/functions: nerve, airway, digestive, vertebrae, vascular, CSF etc. There's very few ways a bullet can pass into or through your neck without doing lasting and serious damage. (Particularly to the nervous system re: motor control, digestive etc. (cont.)
The brain is surrounded by a lot of thick bone, which is both good & bad. Good for obvious reasons it can deflect or sometimes even stop low impact/velocity bullets, but bad for the shrapnelization factor discussed earlier re: ribcage. There's no real "good" places (cont.)
..a bullet can go in your skull, but a few are worse than others. Eyes, ears, nose, & mouth, obviously. Also soft & hard palates, sinuses and brain stem. Pretty much anything's going to compromise the CSF, & in non-ballistic type traumas you should look for it dripping (cont.)
..from the nose or ears (clear, yellowish, slightly syrupy) to see if cerebral spinal fluid sac's compromised. Bullets smashing into the top, front, back, sides of the braincase can send bone fragments (sometimes lots, unfortunately) into the lobes/frontal cortex (cont.)
.and it's anyone's guess what happens next. Whether you lose the ability to speak, swallow or control your bowels, or whether you simply lose a couple of piano lessons is more or less the luck of the draw. Bullets that enter through your face are worse, obviously (cont.)
aesthetically: there's very few facial reconstructions that can really bring you back anything at all like you were before, and anything that tears through either palate, teeth, tongue or jaw will most likely render your speech capabilities barely recognizable. (cont.)
The other complicating factor of facial entrance wounds is the relatively delicate latticework of bone behind the nose/sinus cavity and eye sockets. Again, it's a crapshoot, but there are relatively few "good" places the bullet and/or shrapnelized bone can go, especially (cont.)
behind the nose & eye sockets. Good news/Bad news: you don't die nearly as often as Hollywood leads you to believe when shot in the head or face, but you don't want to live as much as you might think either. You'd be shocked at the number of bullet-to-the-head suicides (cont.)
...that required more than one bullet, likewise the number that survive without the ability to get the 2nd or 3rd bullet in to finish the job. Gabby Giffords was an exceptionally rare case. Most survivors of head shots aren't nearly so lucky & spend their lives regretting (cont.)
..the sentience that's left to them. There's almost always pain, sometimes in flashes, sometimes practically ceaseless, coming in varying degrees of agony. Speech & motor functions are rarely what they were and vegetative states are preferable to the semi-vegetative (cont.)
.that's too often the case. Nerve damage, uncontrollable tremors, & often constant Parkinsonian shaking is more the rule than the exception and honestly very few maintain their sanity or find cause for any emotion besides regret, particularly among suicide survivors (cont.)
..who spend much of their waking hours reliving that final moment when they flinched and botched the job. Their lives are spent in a state of almost perpetual horror & anguish I don't think you could possibly imagine. Anyway, I think those are some of the reasons people (cont.)
"hyperventilate in fear." and what I've described isn't "propaganda" it's what bullets do when they enter people's bodies. Now you can tell me a bit about who gun owners are & why it's important you have the right to own them (which, by the way, I don't dispute, but I am (cont.)
...curious why they're being brought to these "right to work as asymptomatic carriers and infect countless others, a number of whom, statistically speaking, will die." get togethers y'all have been having lately.