About ten grammes of metal, travelling at around four-hundred metres per second (mach 1.2) has just imparted all or most of its kinetic energy to an initial impact-area of nine millimetres diameter…
It's just a flesh wound. Dig the bullet out, couple of stitches, slap a bandage on it, take two aspirins and have the afternoon off. You'll be swinging punches and sprinting after bad guys by tomorrow lunch-time. No worries. What's that? It's an important case and you can't take the afternoon off? Okay, take three aspirins, but for God's sake let your partner drive.
Oh and while I'm on the subject, here's a handy diagram of the upper part of the human skeleton.
Take a good look at the shoulders—where "only a flesh wound" seems to occur most commonly, for some reason known only to authors and film-writers. Now find me a route through that little lot which would result in "only a flesh wound."
Sod the frickin' flesh wound. Isn't it about time this cliché was put up against a wall and shot through the head?
—Daz
[Image source: University of the Western Cape, Cape Town]
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Let’s see… That’s about the weight of a 40SW bullet, but it’s traveling at mach 1.2. That means that as soon as it hits its target, it starts tumbling, turning any soft tissue to jelly and shattering any bone it hits. Now if it makes it out the other side (which may never happen since a tumbling projectile is likely to change direction and create more jelly), after all the bone shards come pouring out the other side with the jelly, it is indeed, “just a flesh wound”.
Here’s a .223 cal bullet (approx. half the diameter of a 40SW and between a third and less than half its mass) hitting a block of ballistic gelatin, used to simulate soft tissue. Look at the damage compared to the size of the bullet.
Yep. After the bleeding stops, 2 or 3 aspirin ought to do the trick.
It was a standing joke when I was a student that whatever you went to the sick bay for they gave you a couple of aspirins. I often wondered whether delivery drivers were given them as well – it wouldn’t have surprised me!
Daz:
Yeah, people don’t seem to understand that being shot anywhere is not a walk in the park. Even getting shot in the shoulder can be a devastating injury. Far more than “only a flesh wound”.
Indeed. I must admit when I wrote this post, I was thinking purely of the literary/movie cliché, but I really do believe too many people think what they see on the screen is reality.