How much damage does a bullet do in REAL life?

Question

In movies, they seem to only stick into the skin, and the size of the puncture wound seems to be as much as the size of the bullet. Now I'm not a physics expert or anything, but I do think that a small piece of metal travelling faster than the fastest hands on earth can actually make a pretty big mess. Anyone know from first-hand experience or can actually tell me the truth?

Answer 1

depends on the bullet, the distance from which it was shot, the area of the body hit, whether it hit bone etc. you can have a bullet make a tiny hole or you can have one that blows a huge hole, there are a lot of factors. check out a forensic pathology book, they give you some good examples.

Answer 2

This depends on the speed of the bullet and the shock effect of the bullet passing through tissue.With the M-16 rifle, it is a sonic effect, where the shock waves disrupt the tissue and a bullet entering the toe could cause massive tissue damage to the hip or even to the intestines. Older gunpowders were less effective and pushed the bullet at less velocity but with the newer powders, the effect is enhanced by the impetus of the bullet. The entry wound tends to be about the same size as the bullet but the exit wound is usually massive. A dum-dum bullet that fragments on impact or those that contain liquid teflon or even mercury cause massive tissue loss. Hollow-point rounds are also very destructive. To watch a hero on TV being hit with a bullet and standing upright is not true. A round from a .357 will spin you around but a round from a .22 cal. is not as fierce and you might stand it...in other words it is not a stopping weapon. This means a weapon that delivers such a profound impact that you will go down...a .44 magnum will stop any man. To get even more dramatic...you might think of tissue...muscle and such being turned to Jell-o by the shock of the projective. But there are many factors that alter the effect of the bullet such as silencers that slow down the speed of the bullet, even the use of a potato or a pillow hinder the bullet slightly in home-made attempts to muffle the sound. A bullet that sticks in the skin is a 'spent' bullet, the force has already been lost and the bullet is more like a splinter than a projectile.

Answer 3

There is a big difference in the effect of high velocity and low velocity rounds. High velocity rounds create a supersonic shock wave in the wound. It give them an almost explosive effect on what they hit. low velocity rounds do not produce this explosive effect and tend to make cleaner wounds.
It matters where the bullet hits, I will only mention rifle because that is all I know, and not on people but from growing up hunting.
The skull is pretty much an enclosed space, and a 30-06 or almost any other 30 calibre can pretty much blow a skull up if it enters the brain case, a lot as if a stick of dynamite went off inside it.
A shot in the neck of a moose took out six inches of spine and left the head attached to the body by a two inch wide strip of skin.
a chest shot on a moose entering from below the diaphram and exiting the front quarter turned the heart and lungs into a pulpy mush, even though the exit wound did not look so terrible.

These creatures are all larger than a man, and slower or lower calibres are still lethal but not as destructive. You can interpret this in terms of humans as you please, others may have experience more related to the question.
If you have access to a rifle range I suggest filling a plastic milk jug with water and setting it as a target, you will get a very clear demonstation of the explosive power of a high velocity bullet. I honestly hope i never see a person shot or have to try to deal with the damage

Answer 4

Yeah ... it really depends on the caliber of the round and where it hits. For example ... it's very common to get a "through and through" wound that does very little damage (other than the obvious pain) to the body, but that's only in small extremities like the bicept area or maybe the calf area. If a 5.56 mm round goes in your chest, on the other hand, it's gonna leave a big mess. You see, this round is "sub-sonic" and begins to roll and tumble as soon as it hit something ... this will creat a "mess" to say the least ... and if exits the body, the hole is about 8 times the size of the entrance wound. IF it's a 7.62 mm round ... your talking an even bigger mess because as the round exits the body, it takes tissue, bone, fabric, ect ... with it and that exit wound is sometimes as big as a 2.5 lb weight plate. Pretty nasty. Why the interest????

Answer 5

I'm an Infantryman with the US Army, currently deployed to Ramadi, Iraq, and I can tell you from experience that most bullet's don't make that big a hole. A .30 caliber bullet, 7.62mm, will make a hole the size of a walnut. It's all the blood and other goo that makes bullet wounds look really bad. Also, it does depend on a lot of factors, including distance and composition of target. Bullets will actually do different things to someone who is extremely obese versus someone who looks like a walking stick.

The real damage that an impact does is internal, where it can bounce around off of bones and destroy organs and blood vessels., or simply expand and tear up everything in your cavities.

Also, most exit wounds, especially exit wounds for fully jacketed rifle rounds, aren't nearly as big as people make them out to be, they are bigger than the entry wound because they bounce off bones and exit the body in a spin, end of end or sideways. Unjacketed rounds, like hollowpoints or Glasers, make large exit wounds because they expand as they move through the body.

The standard Army round, 5.56mm green-tip, will go right through someone and make the same sized hole on both ends, assuming it doesn't hit bone on the way through.

Answer 6

I saw a guy on cops get shot by a .22 and the bullet just bounced off of him. They said he was lucky because he was heavy and was wearing really baggy clothes. On the other hand, have you ever seen the video of the J.F. Kennedy assassination? The bullet that hit him in the head took part of his skull off and some of his brains. I guess it depends on the circumstances. Just read the daily newspaper of watch the local news. Then you will see the damage bullets really can do!!!

Answer 7

Franz Ferdinand was killed with one bullet. The damge that bullet did was WW1, which set the stage for WW2, and the subsequent the Cold War with the nuclear arms build-up. In fact, we still havent seen the extent of the damage that single bullet did back in 1914.

Answer 8

most rounds are milirtary jacketed spearpoints,which when they enter the body have a small entry point,about the size of a five cent piece,the exit wound is usually the size of a dinner plate,which has massive damage to the body and usually results in death from the shock factor.not pretty.

Answer 9

My dad is a cop. He says they make a big mess but how big depends on what kind. A few months ago a freind of mine was murdered in a murder suicide thing. The guy shot her in the head when she was sleeping. When he saw how much mess it made he shot his self in the chest because he was so vein about his hair, he didnt want it to get destroyed.... I think the going in is not the bad part, it the comming out.

Answer 10

Well, having been in the military, and then law enforcement and also as a paramedic, I can state from experience that the wounds can be horrific. As posted above, there are lots of factors, but in general, it's messy.