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Ariana Baio
Mar 29, 2023
5-year-old boy, AR15-Style Gun Involved In Recent School Incidents
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After another deadly school shooting, a new report is visualizing just how lethal the bullet from an AR-15 is.
On Monday, a shooting at The Covenant School, a small Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, left three students and three adults dead.
The shooter used two AR-15-style rifles and a handgun to murder the six people. AR-15-style rifles are becoming increasingly common in mass shootings.
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To exemplify how deadly these semi-automatic weapons can be, The Washington Post used 3D animations to show how bullets from AR-15-style rifles enter and destroy the body.
“What makes the weapon so deadly is the speed of the bullet,” The Washington Post article says.
\u201cthe washington post has an incredible interactive story that shows just how destructive a bullet from an AR-15 is to the body \u2014 using animated recreations of the wounds that killed 6-year-old Noah Pozner and 15-year-old Peter Wang \u2014 and the end of the page just broke my heart\u201d— manny (@manny) 1679932405
In one animation, it shows a .223-caliber size bullet entering an adult male’s body through the chest cavity. Not only does the bullet go through the lung, it “shreds lung tissue, severs nerves, and vessels, and causes massive bleeding”
Comparatively, a 9 mm shot from the same distance takes a “relatively linear” path and causes less damage because it has less force behind it.
This means a person shot with a 9 mm bullet is more likely to survive with immediate medical care than a .223 caliber.
\u201cThe lethality of these kinds of made shootings remains breathtaking. Every person who was injured in the Nashville shooting was killed. The shooter heavily armed with 3 weapons including 2 powerful assault style weapons.\u201d— Abby D. Phillip (@Abby D. Phillip) 1679939203
The Washington Post article uses two children’s autopsies from two different mass shootings to animate how bullets shot with an AR-15-style rifle were lethal, especially in smaller bodies.
One autopsy, from Noah Pozner, shows how the six-year-old boy was killed with an AR-15-style rifle during the Newton Elementary School shooting.
Pozner’s body was “mangled” and part of his face was almost completely destroyed due to the three bullets that hit his hand, torso, and face during the shooting.
Another autopsy, of 15-year-old Peter Wang, shows how 13 bullets completely “deformed” his head and tore apart his body when he was shot during the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
Despite the horrific damage the .223 caliber bullets can impose, the United States has no federal restrictions on AR-15-style rifles.
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