This year, murder rates in Baltimore are on track to surpass death tolls generated by the crack epidemic. And as the husband of an emergency room provider at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, gun violence has remained-at least peripherally-a significant part of my life. Those depictions are distorting understanding of what bullets can-or can’t-do to bodies.Īs a combat medic in Afghanistan, I treated a variety of gunshot wounds. Depictions of gun violence in fictional shows and movies are routine, and often wildly imaginative. (Some lessons: Bullets fired into liquids will stop or disintegrate rather than slice through seawater à la Saving Private Ryan, and a weapon that would blow a victim backwards would also blow the shooter back.) But these examples are outliers. A small sliver of this programming is actually educational, like the ballistics tests performed on Mythbusters. Most of what we learn about gunshot wounds, we learn from watching television. But that wouldn’t prevent a single gunshot to the leg from nearly killing him. If Army scientists and tattoo artists had highjacked a Darpa lab to create the ultimate soldier, they would have created Nick. He was a weapons specialist, and an expert in hand-to-hand combatives. He was 6′5″, approaching 280 pounds, and cut like a linebacker-the position at which he excelled, not coincidentally, as a college football player at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Staff Sergeant Nick Lavery wasn’t only the most physically imposing Green Beret on our team, he was the most physically imposing soldier any of us had ever seen.
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