Speaking from years of experience working as an ER nurse in the Chicago ghetto...
He drew a short straw on the weapon of choice. .22 caliber slugs tend to bounce around inside a person. Anything carrying more energy would likely have shattered his scapula, and gone clean through him. The energy of the slug wouldn't have been used up bouncing around his chest.
I took care of a person shot in the ankle with a .22. The entrance wound was in his ankle and the exit wound was in his groin. Another client had a single hole in his skull with no exit wound. Needless to say, the poor sap didn't do well after having a slug rattle around inside his skull for a while.
But I digress. I just finished watching the first season of The Wire tonight. It reminded me a lot of my stint in Chicago, and I guess I have ballistics on my mind. Back to coding...
Aside from the ease of sound suppressing them, and the small size of the weapons, there is a reason some of the best hit squads in the world use the .22lr!
Admittedly, a .22WMR is pretty much a different animal than the .22lr. Out of a rifle, it would have probably been a through and through, assuming a FMJ bullet -- you'd probably get 2000fps for a 40gr. A JSP might not have, and out of a Ruger Single Six, it's a lot closer to a really hot .22lr rifle.
Sound suppression is largely a function of relatively slowly bleeding off the gas that results from combustion. There is not much powder in a 22lr (22 long-rifle) round, which is why it is easily suppressible. I can make no particular comment as to the frequency of their use by the best hit squads in the world.
The subject of the article was shot with a 22WMR (Winchester Magnum Rimfire) round. This round can use the same bullet as the 22lr round but contains lots more powder.
The velocity of the bullet leaving the barrel of the firearm depends on how fast the charge contained in the casing wants to push it and how much the barrel wants to slow it down due to friction. Almost all rifles barrels are between 16.5" and 24". For a average 22WMR round shooting an 40-grain (unit of mass) bullet out of a mid-length rifle barrel one would expect the bullet to leave the barrel at around 2000 feet/sec. The deceleration caused by friction can be altered by changing the exterior-most material of the bullet: a full metal jacket (usually lead totally encased by copper) is potentially slicker than a jacketed soft-point (only partially encased, with the tip exposed).
A Ruger Single Six is a type of handgun. The story describes a single-action revolver, which the Single Six is not, but let's ignore that. It comes in barrel lengths of 2.75", 4", and 6". Out of a 4" or 6" barrel, the 22WMR has about 1400-1600 feet/sec of velocity. This is roughly comparable with the upper (or hot) range for a 22lr fired out of a rifle barrel.
> There is not much powder in a 22lr (22 long-rifle) round, which is why it is easily suppressible.
Also, .22LR ammunition is generally subsonic outside of hotter loadings. This avoids the characteristic supersonic crack of higher velocity cartridges.
My gun shop sells .22LR ammo, and at a premium, a subsonic version (or at least, cartridges in boxes marked as such). Of all the .22LR ammo I've shot, none of it was marked subsonic and all claimed to provide supersonic muzzle velocities. Wikipedia seems to claims that 'regular' .22LR is supersonic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.22_Long_Rifle#Subsonic). Do you mean that most cartridges don't make their stated muzzle velocity and that in practice most .22LR is subsonic?
(as an aside, subsonic ammo is looked at suspiciously around these parts. since it's mostly used for poaching; when used with a home-made suppressor on a rifle, it's very quiet, like you say, in large part because of the lack of sonic boom).
Muzzle velocities are usually listed for rifle length barrels, sometimes absurdly long rifle length barrels to boost the numbers. 22lr out of a handgun length barrel will fall quite short.
Most manufacturers have quit playing those games. They generally (if you look) tell you what kind of weapon they were tested with, or barrel length failing that.
Doing a bit of googling, the .22LR doesn't gain much velocity beyond 14" barrel length, and loses less than 200fps from a 4" barrel vs the 14".
Sorry, but .22 Long Rifle is generally loaded supersonic from the test fixtures, even in the standard loadings. A pistol (assuming a 6" bbl) is really close to supersonic, if not a bit over. It'll vary by weapon and air density.
Now, you could use one of the other rimfire variations (.22 Short, .22 Long, .22 CB) which generally will fire from a .22 LR chamber. These would most likely get you subsonic velocities.
Another thing to consider when shooting a pistol vs a rifle and comparing sound signatures is that a pistol will eject more unburnt powder into the air around the muzzle as its had less barrel length to burn said powder.
As far as suppression goes, there are four main components of the sound signature of a gunshot:
1) muzzle blast - the expansion of deflagrating powder in the atmosphere as it exits the barrel.
2) sonic crack - the bullet creating a shockwave through the air. Can be avoided by using subsonic cartridges/loadings.
3) the weapons action - at the very least the firing pin's impact on the primer. This is louder than you'd expect.
4) the bullet's impact - very much louder than you'd expect. A rifle bullet impacting flesh is a very loud slap. Imagine dropping a large boneless beef roast on a tile floor from a few meters up.
Of these bits of the gunshot, only 1) can be addressed with a suppressor. And it does make shooting much more pleasant. You can generally avoid most ear protection shooting suppressed, even with supersonic ammo (you won't be in the shockwave so no need to worry about it).
I personally have fired rather large rifles without ear protection, and its generally not real pleasant. I really wish that there was no NFA and we could buy suppressors like some countries (New Zealand comes to mind). A .22 suppressor there is something like $40NZ, here you're looking at $4-600, a $200 tax stamp, and a 6month wait for the BATFE to do a background check that the FBI does in less than a week. Oh, and you can't let your wife/kid use it without being in violation of the NFA unless you have it owned by a trust where the family memebers are trustees.
The only stuff that's consistently making supersonic out of the list is the high velocity stuff. Even Remington Golden Bullet (which Remington advertises as "high velocity" according to the box I have sitting on my desk) falls short of supersonic from pistol length barrels.
I guess the fairer thing to say would be that .22LR is borderline but it drops below supersonic pretty quickly once you start shaving barrel length.
I'm not an expert by any stretch and know virtually nothing about firearms, but I was able to decipher "fps" (feet per second), and 40gr (a 40-grain bullet). As for the other jargon, .22lr and .22WMR are pretty obviously types of weapons and were readily googlable in about 5 seconds.
Indeed. The front page is riddled with all kinds of alphabet soup. FSM, LLVM, RegExp just to name a few. I'd kind of assumed that most of us here have learned to cope with unfamiliar terms either by dismissing or researching them.
It's reasonable to assume "hackers" reading "Hacker News" are expert enough in hacking to decipher computer talk, but unreasonable to assume they're expert enough in guns to decipher gun talk.
Ah, but there's an interesting point here on the social acceptability of non-expertise.
If you post some expert-level stuff about physics or microbiology or linguistics or early Medieval French poetry then most people won't understand it but nobody will complain because they're ashamed (well, at least slightly) of their ignorance on these subjects.
On the other hand if you post some expert-level stuff about guns or football or Justin Bieber then people will complain because they're proud of their ignorance on these subjects. Being an expert on those subjects marks you out as part of a group which some people here don't want to be seen as being part of, so folks are quite proud to proclaim their ignorance on these subjects.
Of course, go to another corner of the internet and it's all switched around.
I'm really kind of floored that my simple little post seems to have been so contentious. People seem to have interpreted my comment as something to the effect that gun talk shouldn't be allowed. All I meant to say, however, was what I said--that a lot of people are simply not going to understand dense gun talk.
I don't think your comment is true, either. I'd be very surprised if most people here were ashamed, even slightly, of their ignorance on any given 'nerd' subject. Very often, the top comments in a story are either explanations or requests for explanations followed by explanations, maybe followed by more requests for clarification. I also bet I can find more people here proud of their ignorance about say, Haskell monads, than about guns, judging by how loud they are about it.
Finally, Justin Bieber is a subject of a different nature--his prominence in culture is disproportionately higher than his importance, so people usually don't want to hear about it. Not a fair comparison.
Funnily enough I posted just this (albeit in a more biting tone) last week, in an instance involving Justin Bieber (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982494), and was getting up/downvoted for a while just like you are until the upvotes won out in the end ;)
It's also reasonable to assume "hackers" reading "Hacker News" know how to use Google and Wikipedia to learn about things that they are interested in but don't understand, instead of asking others to dumb down all conversations to suit them.
There are so many different kinds of hackers here, that I'd almost have to disagree. There aren't many folks here who could tell me all I wanted to know about Haskell, asymmetric encryption, the finer points of being a non-technical founder and the different strengths of various revision control systems. But all of us see stuff like that here every day. We either ignore that which we do not understand, or we look it up.
What the heck? There are millions of us. There are several industries revolving around people who "hack" their weapons. Whether its a new handguard on your AR-15, or buying 10 lbs of gunpowder there are people that can help you out.
In fact, I'd say that there are more of them, than hackers.
I was more thinking of DIY firearms/firearm modification. That would seem very dangerous to me.
It is quite common for criminals in the UK to "re-bore" replica or deactivated weapons. It is also very common for these guns to backfire, killing the shooter.
The idea of gun hacking simply put me in mind of these sad occurrences.
I'm not suggesting anyone is a mouth breathing redneck, or an inept criminal for that matter, lets put it this way: when I think of some of the things I've hacked in the more conventional sense, I wouldn't feel safe if those things had been potentially lethal :)
EDIT: before anyone else brings this up, it has just occurred to me that the category of "potentially lethal" includes every object in existence, especially cars, which people love to hack and I would never anyone accuse of being reckless for hacking. So feel free to disregard my whole point.
Gun hackers in the US are far more familiar with guns than those in the UK. Also you can get higher quality parts for guns in the US (no need for replica or deactivated stuff).
I'm one. And the guy who replied to you before I could has the right idea. There are also pyrotechnics hackers in general, too, many of which really get a kick out of almost any kind of projectile or explosive device. We're not all mouth-breathing rednecks. See also: Metalstorm.
Admittedly, a .22WMR is pretty much a different animal than the .22lr. Out of a rifle, it would have probably been a through and through, assuming a FMJ bullet -- you'd probably get 2000fps for a 40gr. A JSP might not have, and out of a Ruger Single Six, it's a lot closer to a really hot .22lr rifle.
I think I have just experienced what a non-technical user feels like when talking to a hardware geek.
I heard a story, possibly an urban legend, that the Israeli army had classified a particularly underpowered .22 rifle as a "less lethal" weapon so they could use it to shoot protesters, juvenile rock-throwers, and other targets with which they were supposed to exercise a certain amount of restraint. Soldiers then measured their marksmanship by how lethal they could be with this "less lethal" weapon until the government was forced to correct the "mistake."
This is a pretty ugly story that would have gratifying appeal to many people on either side of the issue (I heard it from a conservative guy who was grinning with glee at the supposed cleverness of the Israelis) so there's a good chance it's an urban legend. Confirmation or refutation would be welcome.
Not necessarily. In the context I heard it in, it was anti-Palestinian.
P.S. To go further, the guy who told me the story was planning on buying such a gun if he could confirm it, just to have a conversation piece. Plus the story sounds perfectly in line with the bizarre results you get when bureaucrats are asked to classify things.
There is an infamous book called 'Hitman' published in the 1980's I believe, published by Paladin Press, that claims to be a manual on how to be, surprise surprise, a hitman. It recommends using a .22 for its ease of suppressability. It's a rather stupid for the rest, but what made it famous is that someone committed a murder in the way described in the book and after that the published was sued and the book got taken off the market. See http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/archive/oldnews5/... .
I don't know anything about hit squads using .22, but in the (rural) area I'm from, .22 rifles are known as poachers rifles because when used with subsonic ammo and a homemade suppressor, they are very quiet.
That said, I'm not sure that hit squads are very concerned with being quiet. That Iranian virus expert that got killed the other week was blown up, the Israelis that killed the Hamas leader a while ago didn't even wear disguises and were filmed full frontal. From the targeted killings that make the news, being 'subtle' doesn't seem to be a consideration.
Oh and drug dealers who kill people don't care about being silent, either. All high profile shootings of the last few years in my area were with heavy caliber weapons.
My limited first-ass experience: I got hit by a 9mm FMJ ricochet. Someone put a round into a concrete floor near me, and the bullet broke apart and a piece hit me, or a piece of concrete hit me in the back of the thigh; it left a mark, but didn't break the skin; we found the bullet completely deformed with the jacket shredded in several pieces). The worst part was the sound; despite shooting a lot, it was the first time I'd ever been next to a firearm fired inside a 3m x 2m x 3m concrete room without wearing hearing protection. I also had a sore throat from yelling at the guy for the next ~15 minutes. Strangely, I wasn't actually afraid until the next day (when I realized how easy it would have been for the guy to have shot me in the leg instead, or for the ricochet to have hit me somewhere important nearby, etc.)
Temporary deafness (wax basically protects your ear from further damage by blocking the ear canal; I used hydrogen peroxide to clean it out later, and let a medic look at it with an otoscope to make sure the eardrum wasn't too damaged).
The whole experience made me 1) trust people even less and 2) want to become a certified emt or paramedic at some point, mainly to deal with trauma.
I have a similar anecdote, and strangely enough, a similar reaction.
A group of us were preparing for an IDPA match at a local gun range. One of our most experienced members got a little too complacent and was joking with a friend after finishing a course of fire. He ignored the range safety officer standing next to him. He didn't clear his weapon before he holstered it, and as he holstered it, his hand slipped and the weapon discharged.
We all thought he was fine, and so did he. The range safety officer was in the middle of yelling at him when one of the other members noticed that the guy was bleeding pretty heavily from his right leg. He'd given himself a nice 9mm through-and-through wound to the calf.
The round didn't hit anything important, and we got the bleeding stopped and him off to a hospital without much problem.
A few weeks later, before our next shoot, our group met with a local paramedic and an ER doctor for an informal crash course in gunshot trauma treatment.
Being an RSO is one of the most unpleasant jobs I've ever had. It's even worse on ranges where you're training people who may already want to kill you, or may just shoot you if you try to impart useful training tips like "please maintain muzzle discipline" or "use both hands", which I thankfully have never had to do.
About fifteen years ago I read a book summarizing research into the effects of different types and calibers of handguns and handgun ammunition. (Long story short: Clinton was trying to ban semiautomatic handguns or something, so my dad developed a sudden interest in buying a gun, and he borrowed some books from a friend who was quite an enthusiast.) The study was a survey of thousands of police reports on shootings, and it was done by a law enforcement guy to help law enforcement departments make an intelligent decision about what kinds of guns and ammo to standardize on.
He provided a lot of statistics and made some recommendations, but the overriding theme and message of the book was that the result of shooting someone, or being shot, is unpredictable no matter what kind of weapon is involved. Some examples:
A fatal bullet through the heart can leave a guy up and shooting for over ten seconds -- obviously an eternity for a law enforcement officer in a point-blank shootout.
A guy can get shot and not know it. Police officers are trained to check themselves carefully when any shots are fired, because it has happened that officers thought they were unharmed, went home, laid down to rest, and bled to death.
A guy can be in a shootout and THINK he got shot, and it turns out there's not a mark on him. They get knocked over, feel intense pain, cry out, etc. There were enough of these cases that the researchers were able to find some involving officers who were previously decorated for valor and had in fact been shot before.
A guy can get shot multiple times with a powerful weapon and get lucky, or he can get shot with a tiny weapon and get unlucky. I still remember the story used to illustrate this: a fight between roommates got ugly, and one guy shot the other six times in the chest with a .45. The second guy went to his attic, found his great-grandfather's Civil War-era relic small caliber revolver (something like a .22), went back downstairs, and shot his roommate through the heart, killing him. Forty-eight hours later, his desire for medical care overcame his aversion to getting caught, and he walked into an emergency room. He recovered completely.
The book had a lot of complicated reasoning about the trade-offs involved in choosing handguns and ammunition and made some strong recommendations, but I don't remember any of the specifics. I just remember the author stressing over and over again not to expect any particular result when you shoot somebody.
Here's a PDF analyzing the effectiveness of firearms. It was written in 1989 so it is a bit out of date. Perhaps someone with more experience with firearms can check to see if the article is still relevant.
It does confirm that "Even if the heart is instantly destroyed, there is sufficient oxygen in the brain to support full and complete voluntary action for 10-15 seconds".
Supposedly, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier[1], who was beheaded during the French Revolution, asked his assistant to quickly retrieve his head after the blade fell and count how long he could blink his eyes. The head blinked in the range of 12-15 times.
All I can offer is another anecdote, not a more recent study, but in the self-defense courses I've taken over the past couple years, my instructor has stressed that a shooting is always a gamble.
"The only way to ensure instantaneous incapacitation is to destroy enough important brain matter. Do you want to aim at a 2-inch square target on your opponent's fast-moving head, or do you want to take your chances aiming for center mass?"
So I don't know if this instructor is an oddball or if he represents the current popularly held wisdom, but this instructor at least acknowledges that the effects of gunshot wounds are extremely unpredictable, which lines up with that study.
I cannot help but believe that, in the story of the roommates' fight, the calibers of the handguns involved has been inadvertently swapped. The story then becomes much more credible.
Most civil war revolvers are .36 and .44 (very close to .45) and one shot to the heart would easily be fatal. It is not unheard of for someone to suffer multiple .22 shots to the chest yet suffer little injury. However it _is_ simply unheard of for someone to suffer six .45 shots to the chest yet walk around for days.
It's pretty credible when you consider that the author picked the most vivid example he could find out of thousands of police and FBI reports to illustrate his point. Part of his point was that virtually nothing is unheard of.
You read the book "about fifteen years ago". Knowing something about guns (in particular .45's and .22's) and the fallibility of human memory, it is reasonable to remain skeptical.
Your reaction is exactly the kind of thinking the author was trying to remedy. You should not be surprised at something that bizarre happening once in thousands of shootings. There are so many variables at play (what the person is wearing, their body composition, what exactly the bullet strikes in their body, at what angle, and so on) that trying to predict what happens based on the caliber of the gun is like trying to predict the relative performance of two computer programs based on what language they're implemented in. Sure, there are strong theoretical reasons for favoring one language or handgun over another, and you could easily discern patterns over a reasonable number of sufficiently similar cases, but there are so many other variables that in any particular case all you can offer is a statistically justified guess that could easily turn out to be wrong because of information you weren't given. If I told you Python beat C on six straight performance tests, you probably wouldn't be surprised; you'd just surmise that all six tests involved tasks for which Python has highly optimized libraries. Or you might guess that the Python programmers in all six tests were more skilled than their C counterparts. That would happen by chance from time to time. So why couldn't other variables in the roommate story align to create an outcome that would not be expected based solely on the caliber of the weapon? It could and does happen; that was the author's message. Maybe the second roommate was a huge guy wearing a thick jacket, and each of the bullets struck his ribcage at a lucky angle (after being slowed down by several inches of jacket, fat, and muscle.)
"So why couldn't other variables in the roommate story align to create an outcome that would not be expected based solely on the caliber of the weapon? It could and does happen; that was the author's message. Maybe the second roommate was a huge guy wearing a thick jacket, and each of the bullets struck his ribcage at a lucky angle (after being slowed down by several inches of jacket, fat, and muscle.)"
Because after 15 years it is more likely that you mis-remembered the story or erroneously conflated stories, etc.
And I understand the huge number of possibilities.
Such a remarkable story justifies a citation request: were it a more likely story, none would be required.
Let me turn the tables on you a bit: what is _your_ justification for the story as stated? I see no reason other than a 15-year old memory, possibly that of a child.
P.S. dkari - about your possible "urban legend" (that was downvoted) concerning the Israeli use of .22. I believe it far more likely to be true than the above story.
I was in my late teens when I read the book and read it with the fascination a teenager has for such things. I certainly remember it better than I remember Jude the Obscure despite writing several papers plus a term paper on that book for my AP English class. The particular story of the roommates stuck out precisely because it exemplified the theme of the book perfectly.
I can't provide a citation because I don't remember the title or the author's name, but I can tell you that by expressing skepticism of the story you are in disagreement not just with an anecdote but with the book's overall message and consistent motif, which is not a detail I could have misremembered. You disagree with the author, in short, about whether the result of shooting someone with any particular caliber of handgun is consistent and predictable. The author felt strongly (based on the data he compiled) that it was a mistake to generalize about the effect of any type of gun or ammunition. The author seemed to fear after examining his data that the mere act of stating his conclusions on the relative merits of different types of handguns and ammunition would reinforce a more orderly and predictable vision of the world than the data justified. He said a lot of the appetite for research of the kind he was doing came from officers whose colleagues or subordinates were killed after placing a number of accurate shots on criminals who then lived to serve their sentences in comfort and good health, and he said he had no answers that would prevent that from happening again in the future, only recommendations that would make such incidents a little bit rarer. He took great pains to undermine the idea that the characterization of the real-world performance of any firearm or ammunition load is anything more than statistical, confounded by many other variables. He felt it was wrong to say about any kind of gun or ammunition that it penetrated well or consistently yielded a one-shot stop. He could say that a certain caliber of gun seemed to yield one-hit stops slightly more often than others, but regardless of the caliber you will still see a certain number of four-or-five-hit non-stops followed by the suspect emptying his gun at the officer and then drawing a knife. (I don't think the author put it exactly that way, but it's not snark or exaggeration on my part.) And of course any caliber of gun will yield a one-hit or even zero-hit stop a certain amount of the time, and the best-penetrating round will occasionally fail to penetrate when it matters.
To be more concrete, in a gunfight between (say) a .45 and a .22 fired with equal accuracy, any trained person would want to be holding the .45, but the very clear-cut and undeniable advantage a .45 has over a .22 does not translate to a predictable outcome, any more than having two aces in hold 'em guarantees that you will have the best hand after the flop. You can be 100% certain that a .45 is better than a .22 in that situation, but you can't predict with 100% confidence that the guy with the .45 is going to end up better off after the random confounding variables are figured in. You would bet on the .45, of course, but sometimes you'd be wrong, even measured by the long-term effect of the wounds (which as I understand it is more predictable than the short-term effect of being shot.)
And of course, as I pointed out before, he had excellent reason and opportunity to cherry-pick a perfect example that would surprise his readers and undermine their appetite for generalizations (which appetite many of them doubtless bought his book to feed.)
"You disagree with the author, in short, about whether the result of shooting someone with any particular caliber of handgun is consistent and predictable."
No, I merely don't trust that story! It is literally incredible. Human memory is fallible, conflatable, and we often confabulate unconsciously. Were you to provide a citation then I could research it. Perhaps you will remember the author or title after some pondering.
Your AP English classes were not wasted - you're a distractingly excellent writer. But please put down the red fish; you are among friends here (I think).
Doc with a degree in physics, previously a weapons and anti-terrorism officer on an aircraft carrier and recently (a year ago) took the combined forces combat casualty care course, and have done a few trauma rotations in inner-city ERs (New Orleans and Norfolk).
Chapter 1 of the Emergency War Surgery Manual (updated in 2006 to collect lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan) dedicates Chapter 1 to dispelling misconceptions about injuries. The science comes down on the side of the cop answering in Google: the weapon is of little use in predicting the outcome.
"... took the combined forces combat casualty care course, and have done a few trauma rotations in inner-city ERs (New Orleans and Norfolk) ..."
Interesting read. Knowing "how" to react and "reacting" in a appropriate, timely manner in a chaotic environment is a big jump even with the right kind of practice (as opposed to fake practice: http://bootload.posterous.com/through-my-eyes-fake-practice ) especially at the first response end. How do you train for the gap between working in calm controlled environments to chaotic ones?
More than the shotgun (I would spect to die and Im not very curious on that matter) what really intrigues me is what would I feel after 10 years of zero sexual activity.
Sexual feelings are really strong, that has to cause real pain through the years, I dont know if being grateful of being alive could easily overcome them
I know an ex-intelligence officer. He's been shot multiple times, and says that getting shot really hurts. I assume it was even worse than usual for him since he was in the field and couldn't quite waltz into the nearby hospital for treatment.
He also says getting shot is worse when you're running away from someone than when it takes you by surprise. He said some other things, but I don't really remember them.
I've had a pneumothorax - the collapsed lung part of his experience - which required major surgery and a painful recuperation. That was awful enough on its own but was only a tiny part of what he experienced. Yikes.
I've had a pneumomediastinum - similar thing but right next to my heart. Pretty scary just having a massive pain in your chest and not knowing what's wrong. I was lucky though and didn't need any surgery and it just cleared up on its own.
You are lucky. Pneumomediasitnum gets particularly nasty if you the reason you have it is a torn esophagus, and you have partially eaten food (along with the air) leaking into the sack around your heart.
I've had three (all spontaneous). The first one was pretty serious and they had to put in a chest tube in a bit of a hurry, so nothing aside from a small amount of topical anesthetic. Seeing them stuff several inches of a metal tube directly into your chest is like being shot in slow motion.
If you do a google search to find out who this guy is you'll discover that this story has been copied in a number of different answer sites and blogs for the last 5 years.
But no info on who this is or the backstory on the context of why he got shot.
Joke? I couldn't joke about a deadly situation. I accidentally read "I shot myself".
Now as a side note, I want to say to everyone who downvoted my comment without saying why, I think this is an idiot's move. Yes, I am saying it. At least if you are going to do it, give a feedback. Otherwise you haven't added anything to the conversation. And just so you know, it's not about karma. It's about you not adding anything to the conversation.
In response to your sidenote, bullshit. Whining about downvotes without "saying why" is an idiot's move. Replying to that whining (as I am doing now) might possibly be an idiot's move, I'm not sure. But voting is not an idiot's move, and lack of explanation does not make it so.
Upvotes and downvotes add the same thing to the conversation:
1) They're a system by which the collective collectively modifies what comments get seen, and in what order
2) They're a system of feedback about what is a valuable contribution
Neither of those contributions requires "saying why". Of course, it is true that the second function works a lot better if the voter communicates a "why", that's easy to see. But it's easy to see that the first function is served just fine by voting without comments (and indeed, since your downvoted comment was erroneous, the conversation benefited from it being removed via downvoting).
Further, we all already know that some explanations of "why" distract from the conversation more than they contribute. The most-obvious example is "+1 agree" or "+1 this", or even "+1 this comment told me something I didn't know". Or, in your case, people could have commented "-1 unsubstantiated" or "-1 parent post misread FA" or something.
Either way, whining about voting _really_ doesn't add to the conversation. If I had downvote ability, I'd downvoting comments that complain about downvotes.
tl;dr: Downvotes without explanations are just as much a positive contribution to the conversation as upvotes.
Whining about downvotes without "saying why" is an idiot's move. Thank you. According to your comment I am not an idiot because I "said why" : if you are going to do it, give a feedback. Otherwise you haven't added anything to the conversation. .
I cannot start to think of a world where giving someone a coin as a way of saying you are adding value is just as effective as taking away a coin from them as a way of saying you are taking away value. The way we communicate online should just be an extension of how we communicate in real life. In practice you should only be able to downvote someone because you upvoted them in the past. So in a sense you would take back what you gave them. Otherwise it is nothing short of robbery.
I have never downvoted anyone, unless it was done by mistake. Maybe we are different, but I just do not see how downvotes are helpful. I respect your point, but I think it doesn't make sense.
Yeah, I scrolled down hoping it would say. Remarkable none the less. Makes me very glad (scrap that, thank god) I live in the UK where carrying deadly weapons isn't seen as a right.
THIS debate definitely does not belong here. Seriously, even if humankind ever does sort out the essentially intractable problem of governmental control over the carrying of lethal weapons by the citizenry, I am willing to bet everything I own that we won't be sorting it out here on Hacker News.
I reckon we could have a fucking boring argument about it though. I've seen it done, it looks easy.
You'll find similar differences between the "feet and fists" death rate. What are the "feet" control laws?
And, the UK's low firearms death rates predate the firearms laws, which largely occurred post-WWI to stop a communist takeover.
Note the US' firearms death rate isn't uniform. For example, most of the peninsula's is better than the UK's best, but East Palo Alto, which has exactly the same laws (and lower firearms ownership than Palo Alto), is horrendously worse.
Parts of the US are third-world, with all that that entails. Gun control won't change that.
OK, but a) Northern Ireland has been in a state of at best hevy terrorist activity and at worst borderline civil war in some areas for a good part of the last 40 years, and b) Relative populations:
England: 51.5m
Wales: 3m
Northern Ireland: 1.5m
So in NI we're talking about just over 1,000 deaths against E/W combined, about 200. Hence the separate treatment.
The stats in this table are terribly out of date. I'm not criticizing your post, just pointing it out. Also odd the authors of this article chose to publish 2 numbers for the U.S. I interpret them for corresponding to 2004/1993, which means there was a significant difference between those two years, not the rate is between those numbers.
I've bemoaned the difficulty in finding reliable, research-quality statistical data like this for a long time. I've even tried to raise capital to for a start-up to do this. No luck.
Counterpoint; anyone not in uniform and carrying a gun = criminal.
Deal with accordingly.
(This is definitely one of the debates to avoid here because it is very polarizing, however, for the record we have a pretty good firearms record in the UK)
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. What you say is absolutely correct. In the UK it's easy for law enforcement to find certain types of criminal simply because they are in posession of firearms.
Random anecdote; for some (I suppose obvious) reason a surprising number of drug dealers are caught because they are caught carrying weapons - which leads to searches, which leads to the drugs.
At least; that is my impression from the cases I see.
> Random anecdote; for some (I suppose obvious) reason a surprising number of drug dealers are caught because they are caught carrying weapons - which leads to searches, which leads to the drugs.
How do they get "caught carrying weapons" without a search to find said weapons? (Terry v Ohio explains some of this, but note that Terry lets police search you even if you're not carrying.)
If our goal is to catch drug dealers, we could just let cops search based on hunches. After all, those hunches are fairly accurate.
> At least; that is my impression from the cases I see.
I should say that banning guns because guns are a good way to detect general crime seems like a flawed move to me. What I support is banning guns as a good way to detect gun crime.
Just have to say, before reading all of this, REALLY glad this many HN readers and posters are into this topic. Thought I was the only nut that loved technology and firearms, guess I was wrong.
I surely was, but surely am no longer :) He resides in PA too, just like me, where our gun control laws favor freedom over oppression (all you Cali/NJ/NYers out there). But I digress.
I am trying to find an answer here.
I was shot by a .22 from some kind of semi auto pistol.
It was night on a porch with 1 60watt light on.
I rushed to the door after hearing my daughter screaming opened the screen to see a boy on the porch turn toward me with a semi hand gun in his right hand.
He was 1-2 feet away.as I saw the gun coming around to shoot me.
I knew I had to get the gun and reached for it with intense urgency.
I saw a flash and felt something hit my upper chest HARD.and heard a 'pop'
I remember thinking I failed horribly and was going to die.
The next thing I remember I was chasing him down the street hitting him with the butt of the gun until all I was hitting him with was the barrel.
...much happened..
As I was calling 911 very distressed I told them I had been shot -- but looking down I could see no blood and no hole in my white cotton shirt..
The police recovered a .22 slug a couple feet inside the door to the left (door opens to the right) ..and no I have never owned a .22 and the slug in no way belonged on the floor.
I later found what looked like a lead colored smudge mark above a button hole on my white shirt and my chest was bright red behind that spot.
How the heck did that .22 not enter my chest?
I had a thick cotton work shirt on with a tee shirt on beneath it -- But that is not enough to block a .22 in my experience.
?Anyone?
This happened 4 days ago so my recollection is fairly fresh.
Foot pounds are a commonly used unit of energy when discussing small projectiles such as bullets, pellets, arrows and bolts. I believe the author's use of "foot pounds per square inch" was an error.
WolframAlpha calculates the energy of a 40 grain bullet at 1550 feet per second to be 213.3 foot pounds, not 324. Winchester claims that a 40 grain .22 magnum bullet from a rifle-length barrel exits the muzzle at 1910 feet per second and has 324 foot pounds of kinetic energy. WolframAlpha agrees.
A foot pound is the amount of energy used when applying one pound of force over the distance of one foot (specifically, with the direction of the force being the same as the direction of movement).
So, if you use one pound of force to move an object one foot, you have used one foot pound of energy (or about 1.355 Joules).
Pounds per surface area is pressure. Foot pounds per surface area is something else.
It's the amount of energy required to lift one pound vertically by one foot, or the amount of momentum a one pound object gains by falling one foot in a vacuum.
Energy per area? A foot-pound is a unit of energy, analogous to a Joule, defined as the amount of energy required to apply one pound of force over a distance of one foot.
I can see a use for such a unit; it's just not one I've ever encountered before.
Well, a watt per square meter is a measure of irradiance, so I guess if you integrate that with respect to time you'd get joules per square meter. But I don't know if that gives you anything interesting.
Not exactly. Here, foot-pound refers to the energy of the bullet, which can be calculated by taking the dot product of the force and the distance, where the force and distance refer to how far the bullet could exert some force. Taking the dot product means that only the components of the force and distance that are in the same direction are used to calculate the result.
When calculating torque, the force is applied in a direction perpendicular to the distance that is measured, because the distance refers to the distance between the place where the force is exerted and the center of rotation. Therefore torque is calculated by taking the cross product of the force and the distance. So while the units look the same, what they are measuring is different.
I learned by talking to law enforcement types that used to hang around our computer store that unlike the "violent ballet" in movies most gunfights unfold with both combatants clumsily emptying their weapons in each others general direction, then staggering out to wait for the paramedics.
It depends entirely on where they're hit, and how much adrenaline and man-made drugs are in their blood stream. But as a common saying goes, "it's a gun, not a death ray." It's surprising - shocking even - how much damage some people can take and still keep going.
There is so much anecdotal evidence in this thread. I thought that the HN community would have a greater adversion to firearms as even their ownership by a community increases the chance of fatal violence.
Your heard it here first. Being shot once feels like being shot three times. But is it linear? If I was shot 3 times would it feel like 9 times or even more?
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I found this disturbingly fascinating in a similar manner to reading autopsy or accident reports. It was clear and explained a process that I wasn't familiar with even though I shoot a .22 target pistol and .22 target rifle. Between the linked article and some of the comments it gave me a new found respect for my peashooters.
He drew a short straw on the weapon of choice. .22 caliber slugs tend to bounce around inside a person. Anything carrying more energy would likely have shattered his scapula, and gone clean through him. The energy of the slug wouldn't have been used up bouncing around his chest.
I took care of a person shot in the ankle with a .22. The entrance wound was in his ankle and the exit wound was in his groin. Another client had a single hole in his skull with no exit wound. Needless to say, the poor sap didn't do well after having a slug rattle around inside his skull for a while.
But I digress. I just finished watching the first season of The Wire tonight. It reminded me a lot of my stint in Chicago, and I guess I have ballistics on my mind. Back to coding...