What is one thing that you were taught or overheard when younger that you repeated with faith as accurate but is not?

[Magdump]

Huh? Do you have this in Braille?

Lol

 

[Magdump]

One that I heard thrown around quite a bit when I was younger was .22lr being referred to as “ping pong rounds” because if someone was shot in the head with one the bullet would bounce around like a ping pong ball after entering the skull. I believed it because I heard it on a handful of different occasions. I remember feeling like an idiot once I was old enough to buy guns and started educating myself on them.

I can’t completely disagree with that analogy. Having seen a significant number of head shots over the years, I can tell you that on more than one occasion I’ve seen the direct evidence of bullets entering the cranium and then riding the inside of the skull, penetrating the frontal scalp and caverning around the outside of the skull to exit the posterior scalp. Upon autopsy I’ve seen the evidence of one self inflicted .22LR GSW in the mouth spiral inside the skull and exit through the orbit, just under the eye, effectively making a U-turn. Upon inspection of my oldest son’s first deer kill, a jacketed soft point .30 cal bullet with a broadside hit, left the jacket in the heart and the remainder of the bullet exited just before the hind quarter on the same side, making a 90 degree turn at minimum. The 5.56 round reportedly can bounce around in the body as well. Bullets can do some extraordinary things.

 

[El Pozzinator]

^^that. Used to work as an investigator for a coroner’s office. It’s truly remarkable what a combination of hydraulic shock, varying target densities (clothing, adipose, muscle, bone, etc), target orientation and motion at moment of impact (if discernible), and bullet velocity - down to scenes where we’d find more than one shell casing type, indicating multiple projectile variables - will do inside of a body. I’ve seen cases where people had an impact wound in the front abdomen and an exit wound in the deltoid, or an impact in the scapula (shoulder blade) and an exit from the opposite buttock after a ricochet off the inside of the pelvis…

And as @Magdump pointed out, head shots are a veritable roulette game figuring the physics of small caliber impacts.

Not exactly JFK magic bullet stuff, but all bets as to trajectory are definitely out the window if the jacket separates.

 

[sawgrass]

You only get one chance to make a first impression.