Liberal Forum

Huey » 04 Jul 2022, 10:05 am » wrote: ↑

04 Jul 2022, 10:05 am

 The bullet that struck U.S. Representative Steve Scalise last week was traveling at somewhere between 1,100 and 2,600 feet per second. The projectile, a 7.62 x 39 bullet, hit the House majority whip with between 370 and 1,550 foot-pounds of force. The rifle round, which is longer than a pistol projectile, likely also began tumbling after its point collided with his hip. That meant that the tip didn’t just bore straight through him, but rather that the whole length of the projectile rotated over and over through Scalise’s body, ripping a wider hole and distributing a bigger shock wave throughout his bones and tissue.
 Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana whose condition has been upgraded to “serious,” suffered broken bones, ruptured blood vessels, and shredded internal organs. The gunman was able to inflict such extensive damage from across a baseball field because he was using a semiautomatic rifle that may have qualified as an assault weapon, akin to a standard infantry combat weapon. Some basic physics explains why the choice of weapon, or more precisely, the choice of bullet, enabled the suspect, James Hodgkinson, who was killed by law enforcement officers, to wreak so much havoc.

https://www.thetrace.org/2017/06/physic ... lt-rifles/