www.theatlantic.com/…
My primary source is the article liked above, but I already knew what cavitation is. I used to repair band instruments. The industry has moved to ultrasonic cleaning. Why? Ultrasound causes cavitation and can separate dirt from substrate better than cleaning acid alone.
Dolphins can’t swim at top speed in shallow water. Why? Cavitation causes pain and they know better than to destroy their bodies enduring it. At top speed in shallow water cavitation would shred the flesh of their tail fin.
So, what is cavitation? Cavitation is the forming of micro bubbles and their collapse happening at great speed. This action can be highly destructive.
From Britannica:
cavitation, formation of vapour bubbles within a liquid at low-pressure regions that occur in places where the liquid has been accelerated to high velocities, as in the operation of centrifugal pumps, water turbines, and marine propellers.
So let’s get back to the AR-15. The speed of bullets fired from an AR-15 have nearly three times the velocity of bullets fired from a hand gun. Kinetic energy is a square law. This means the bullet has nearly 9 times the kinetic energy of other bullets fired from more conventional weapons. As a bullet from an AR-15 passes through the body, it is traveling fast enough to cause cavitation which can kill cells fairly far removed from the actual path of the bullet. This leaves large swaths of tissue completely killed; totally dead. In a normal bruise there are some damaged cells and some undamaged ones. The body clears the dead tissue and regenerates new cells by dividing the survivors. What if there are no surviving cells?
This means that AR-15 bullets can kill you even if they strike the body in an area that would not be life threatening if struck by bullets traveling slower. These amateur shooters need not be accurate in order to kill.
These weapons were designed this way to be used on the battlefield. There is no excuse for allowing them in civilian hands.