Judging from Post editor Sally Buzbee’s introduction to the project, as well as from my own reporting, the paper talked to dozens of survivors and family members and weighed the enormous range of their opinions about this issue to craft the feature. It was so much better than I was expecting that it initially blinded me to the way it was bad. But bad in a kind of routine way: The media, as well as certain kinds of activists, believe we need to be presented with graphic, grisly evidence to grasp what are simply facts. This grisly evidence, they posit, will change hearts and minds.
It will not. Upwards of three-quarters of American voters support almost every commonsense gun law. And we know why political leaders haven’t heeded their call: the gun lobby, and its disgusting political servants. But the Post tried, anyway, with its multimedia “Terror on Repeat” project. I won’t impugn these journalists’ motives. I’ll assume they are good. I’ll just tell you what I saw, and why I would like to spare people seeing the same thing. Especially survivors.
The 5.56 mm high velocity rifle round tends to fragment though, creating multiple wound channels pointing in different directions from the impact point. This makes it very dangerous despite its small size, and has high kinetic energy due to the velocity squared term.
It does need some distance after impacting flesh to fragment like this, but when it happens it can be catastrophic if it hits critical organs or arteries.
It’s almost as if the army tried to make the 5.56 bullet more effective at killing enemy soldiers. But now I’ve learnt that they wanted to create clean, non-deadly wounds.
/s in case it’s not obvious.
That’s just straight up not true. 5.56, especially steel core is designed to penetrate bulletproof armor. You aren’t penetrating bulletproof armor if you fragment hitting skin or bone.
You’ve got them switched. It’s hollow point handgun ammo that isn’t supposed to fragment, but can depending on the quality of the ammo and what it hits can. A defective hollow point will do exactly what you’ve described.
5.56 mm FMJ ammo can
, and has increasing chance of fragmentation at higher terminal velocities. This is also particularly exacerbated when striking bone. Both M855 and M193 steel core rounds exhibit this effect.
The mild steel penetrator on M855 “green tip” ammunition enhances penetration on hard targets, but is not an AP (armor piercing) ammunition. It will go through level IIIa (soft) armor, but so will pretty much any rifle bullet other than .22lr. It should not go through level III armor, and definitely not level IV.
The older M193 ammunition (pre-1980) was what really tended to tumble and fragment, and that’s the most common range ammo in use today; a 55gr FMJ BT.