The reality of assault weapon wounds, aka clinical info gun rights advocates refuse to aknowledge and often work tooth and nail against:
I was looking at a CT scan of one of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer … One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle which delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. There was nothing left to repair … the injury was fatal.
A NASA study based on an innovative technique for crunching torrents of satellite data provides the clearest picture yet of changes in Antarctic ice flow into the ocean. The findings confirm accelerating ice losses from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and reveal surprisingly steady rates of flow from its much larger neighbor to the east.
There’s some gun commentary below the fold for anyone who is interested.
One thing I like about science is its truthfulness, for lack of a better term. Science is all about accuracy, it’s a field where there really is such a thing as being objectively right or objectively wrong. Which is everyone from murderous authoritarian sleaze-bags to advertising execs seek to manipulate it or discredit it. It’s not difficult to apply the basic tenets of science to other problems, sometimes that helps clear things up. For example, we all agree that if there were no guns anywhere, there would be no gun deaths anywhere, right? Ancient Rome for example had zero gun deaths, because they had no guns. We all agree that somewhere between a butter knife and an ICBM tipped with a MIRV, there is a line to be drawn. On one side of the line we’re each, individually, willing to tolerate people owning the items and accept the risk that poses to us, on the other side of that line, we don’t.
For what it’s worth, I have both been accidentally shot, and I once accidentally shot someone else. Both from stupidly fooling around with a .22 at a young age with zero supervision in direct violation of well-stated and well-known parent rules, and both wounds were relatively minor. But they were only relatively minor because of where they struck on the body; either one could have been fatal. So, I really, really do understand that my odds of being accidentally or intentionally injured, go up, very slightly, if my family members, coworkers or neighbors have butter knives or dueling pistols, or anything else. They go up way more if anyone in my city or state or country or planet has biological or nuclear weapons in a private arsenal. Basic reasoning, simple inference: It depends on a lot of factors, not the least of which is how powerful, how deadly those weapons are.
The question then is where do we draw that line, how much of an increased risk are we willing to accept, not individually, but collectively? Banning assault weapons, putting them on the other side of the line opposite the butter knife, seems reasonable to me. For those of you who might not be able to buy assault weapons in the future or who might lose the ones you have, I’m sorry for your loss, and rest assured you’ll be in my thoughts and prayers.