How bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart
Author of the article:Washington Post
Washington Post
N. Kirkpatrick, Atthar Mirza and Manuel Canales, The Washington Post
Published Mar 29, 2023 • 5 minute read
The wounds show the lethal force of the AR-15, but they are rarely seen.
The gun is the weapon of choice for many mass killers. It fires bullets at such a high velocity – often in a barrage of 30 or even 100 in rapid succession – that it can eviscerate multiple people in seconds. A single bullet lands with a shock wave intense enough to blow apart a skull and demolish vital organs. The impact is even more acute on the compact body of a small child.
“It literally can pulverize bones, it can shatter your liver and it can provide this blast effect,” said Joseph Sakran, a gunshot survivor who advocates for gun violence prevention and a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
During surgery on people shot with high-velocity rounds, he said, body tissue “literally just crumbled into your hands.”
The carnage is rarely visible to the public. Crime scene photos are considered too gruesome to publish and often kept confidential. News accounts rely on antiseptic descriptions from law enforcement officials and medical examiners who, in some cases, have said remains were so unrecognizable that they could be identified only through DNA samples.
As Sakran put it: “We often sanitize what is happening.”
The Washington Post sought to illustrate the force of the AR-15 and reveal its catastrophic effects.
This account is based on a review of nearly 100 autopsy reports from several past AR-15 shootings, including those at schools in Connecticut and Florida,as well as court testimony and interviews with trauma surgeons, ballistics experts and a medical examiner.
The records and interviews show in stark detail the unique mechanics that propel these bullets – and why they unleash such devastation in the body.
Any bullet can kill, and instantly, when it hits a vital organ. The higher speed of a bullet from an AR-15 causes far more damage after it hits the body and drastically reduces a person’s chances of survival.
“As that bullet slows down,” said trauma surgeon Babak Sarani, an authority on casualties from mass killings, “that energy is so massive it has to go someplace, and your body will literally tear apart.”
In the scenario depicted, a typical handgun bullet from the same distance takes a relatively linear path and causes far less damage. With immediate medical care and minimal bleeding, the victim would have a chance at surviving that gunshot.
The bullet from the AR-15, however, would cause torrential bleeding that is quickly lethal.
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When multiple bullets from an AR-15 strike one body, they cause a cascade of catastrophic damage.
This is the trauma witnessed by first responders – but rarely, if ever, seen by the public or the policymakers who write gun laws.
The Post determined that there is a public interest in demonstrating the uniquely destructive power of the AR-15 when used to kill.
What follows is a detailed depiction showing the impact of bullets fired from AR-15s at two young victims. It is based on autopsy reports for Noah Pozner and Peter Wang that The Post obtained through public records.
Because of the unusual visual nature of the presentation, The Post took the added step of seeking – and receiving – the consent of the victims’ families before proceeding with this account. The Post offered the families the opportunity to view the depictions in advance of publication, which they declined to do.
The families also declined to be interviewed for this story, but a spokesperson for the Wang family offered a statement explaining why Peter’s parents, Hui and Kong Wang, provided their consent to The Post.
“Peter’s parents want people to know the truth,” said Lin Chen, their niece and Peter’s cousin. “They want people to know about Peter. They want people to remember him.”
This presentation may be disturbing to some people.
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Noah was found dead on the floor of Classroom 8 at Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, 2012. He was 6. He was wearing a red Batman sweatshirt, black pants and black sneakers.
He loved Batman. He was full of energy, his family said, curious and imaginative. He wanted to be an astronaut, and he also wanted to manage a taco factory, because he loved tacos. Noah would tease his sisters that when they went to bed, he was going off “to his third shift” at the factory, so convincingly that they would wake up to make sure he was still in bed.
It was cold that morning when his father, Lenny, dropped him off at school, “but he jumped out not wearing his jacket and he had one arm in one sleeve and his backpack in his other arm, and he was kind of juggling both and walking into the school that way,” Lenny Pozner would later testify.
“And that’s the last visual I have of Noah.”
The first visual that Connecticut State Police Sgt. William Cario has of Noah is this: 15 children and two educators are piled on top of one another in a small school bathroom on the southwest corner of the classroom. Cario proceeded to pull them out one by one. All were dead.
One of them was Noah.
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Peter was found dead in a third-floor hallway of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day 2018. He was 15. He was wearing his Army JROTC uniform.
He kept notes in his bedroom drawer about his plans. He had joined the military training corps, with its mission to “motivate young people to be better citizens,” as an important step toward attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Born in New York to parents from China, he was always helping everyone around him, friends and family said. Once, at Disney World, he held a friend’s child aloft in a crowd for 20 minutes so she could see a fireworks display.
When gunfire broke out in Parkland, Peter was in study hall, playing chess with a friend. He held the door open for other students to escape.
A few of them made it. He did not.
The wounds show the lethal force of the AR-15, but they are rarely seen.
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