I don't think of the impact of gun violence in the same way as those who discuss politics, blaming, identify cultural factors or the usual predictable discussions.
We also have plenty of handgun violence with multiple victims but that's often between some who know each other.
However, when someone full of hate for people he doesn't even know decides to use a weapon invented for the battlefield, it's about what that does to the human body. In a typical handgun injury, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments and an X-ray would show a thin, generally straight, grey line
With a semi-automatic weapon as an AR-15 or AK-47 firing at a round a second, the high velocity bullet imparts a tremendous amount of kinetic energy into the body creating a cavitation with such force that everything is blown to the sides. The exit wound created by the force not the bullet is two, three, four times bigger than any handgun wound. The bullet fragments stay in the body creating their own damages.
Such an impact to the brain or near any vascular organs in the chest is instantly fatal. If a bullet from a high-muzzle velocity weapon hits the abdomen, for instance, the air-filled organs like the intestines and bladder explode. Only pieces are left from the cavitation created by the shock its velocity. Only those people who did not damage to the abdominal aorta, which delivers all the blood to the lower body from the heart, make it to the trauma surgeon. But there is still a lot of blood, tissue and remains of organs and it's a race to stop all the bleeding, replace blood and fluids, clamp off bladder and intestines that are salvageable, evacuate all that and intestinal contents that would be a source for sepsis and, in a female, the reproductive organs. Traumatic injuries to the urinary system and the spine are possible.
In a semi-solid but very vascular organ like the liver, the bullet creates an expanding hole but without the explosion seen in organs more full of air. A high-muzzle weapon shatters hard bone into hundreds of microscopic pieces, in a way that cannot be repaired. A surgeon needs to essentially clean out the bone that has been struck and remove it from the body; it’s now a worthless tissue. With weapons engineered to fire once a second, a person may have two or three of these rounds enter their body in close proximity. Handguns are different.
When someone comes into the ER with that type of damage from a high-velocity bullet, the first surgery is to keep them alive, but multiple surgeries, when they are more stable, are usually required. In El Paso, one father has had five surgeries so far. Two people that made to the trauma surgeon are now counted among the dead with injuries too extensive after initially surviving the first surgery. Every domestic terrorist wants to also inflict the non-physical injuries as well as maximize the death toll of humans he never met but on whom he has focused his hate.
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Who uses that type of weapon and ammunition even on an animal? We each struggle to understand what type of person would do that to another human being even as we know it's realistic that there may be three to five more of these type of mass killings by these domestic terrorists in the next twelve months.
