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Comment by mellavora | Hacker News Reader

I saw an interesting stat on this, in an article looking at 'which bullet caliber has the most stopping power' by looking at data from real shooting incidents (mostly police records).

If I remember right, the conclusion was that 50% of the time, it didn't matter what the caliber was. The person got hit, realized they'd been shot, thought they were supposed to fall down, and then did.

The other 50% did come down to the bullet caliber, lining up pretty much as you'd expect, along with some interesting stories of people who took mortal wounds from high-caliber rounds and kept fighting for a few minutes.

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> 50% of the time, it didn't matter what the caliber was. The person got hit, realized they'd been shot, thought they were supposed to fall down, and then did

Something that surprised me when watching the NZ masque terrorism shooter's first-person video was how uniformly everyone shot immediately collapsed. It looked fake like a Hollywood movie, except it was real.

I have no firsthand experience with people being shot, but based on that particular footage my impression is people tend to go down hard immediately.

I'd like to think I'm someone who would fight to live, as is being discussed in this thread. But at the same time, in a situation like that where I'm completely unprepared to be shot at, I think immediately collapsing is probably the right strategy. If I keep struggling to escape I'm just gonna get shot again.

I am thinking back to the quote from Dune: "you've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap. there's an animal kind of trick. a human would remain in the trap endure the pain feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."

> But at the same time, in a situation like that where I'm completely unprepared to be shot at, I think immediately collapsing is probably the right strategy. If I keep struggling to escape I'm just gonna get shot again.

In the video the shooter fires repeatedly into the piles of collapsed bodies, and there's a disturbing lack of reactions. Folks survived but I suspect most of those were just lucky to be shielded by others who weren't so lucky.

As far as I understand any rifle bullet of reasonable size hitting center of mass will make you go down unless you're incredibly lucky and it doesn't hit anything of value.

Imagine a peak Mike Tyson punch to the liver / lungs / kidneys / &c. that's if it doesn't straight up break your spine

https://youtu.be/6hJZdtPcVdE?t=55

Trigger warning: ugly considerations ahead.

I have not watched the footage of the NZ shooting. I just wanted to speak to some considerations that might drive sudden collapse. Mechanically, there's two things I'd point at:

First, a bullet wound to the heart itself, or close enough (see next point) can effectively be an off switch, in the sense that you're blowing out the hydraulic system feeding blood to the brain. Suddenly loss of flow and pressure means no oxygen getting supplied to the brain; when that happens, willpower and mindset don't mean anything.

Secondly, a rifle round tends to be moving at least twice the speed of a pistol round, bringing with it significantly more kinetic energy and hydrostatic shock, creating a much larger wound channel, more likely blowing out a critical system and/or delivering massive shock to various organs.

I once got kicked by a horse (shoed) and collapsed just as soon as I located help. Until then I was able to keep moving despite 5 bones being broken, and piercing through my skin, including a major nerve dangling on the outside. Most eye opening experience of my life.

Before you watch this video again or another one like it I'd like you to think hard about how the victims' relatives feel about this video existing. Peace be with you.

The records of the truly gruesome parts of human history should not simply be allowed to evaporate out of sight. These things should be treated with respect, not broadcast publicly, but treated with the sort of dignity accorded to the visual recordings we have (photos and videos) of concentration camps. These things are evidence of the worst of what we can do, and have the potential if kept proper to outlive the survivors of such tragedies providing a form of permanent memory of the tragedy they suffered.

It does not belong on YouTube, but absolutely belongs in some sort of publicly accessible archive behind the digital wall of possibly a free signup form and definitely some reminders of just what you’re about to look at. And before anyone suggests some variation of right to be forgotten, I’d counter-argue that right ends when what happens to you is a national tragedy that significantly changes the society you lived in.

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