[Double Naught Spy]

“Early in my medical training, I learned that it is not the bullet that kills you, but the path the bullet takes.”
I thought long and hard about commenting on this statement and then decided to just let it sit there and be a reflection on the person who made it.

He made a true statement whether you like it or not. Lots of people are walking around with bullets inside of them. The bullets are not killing them.

"Once they enter the body, they fragment and explode, pulverizing bones, tearing blood vessels and liquefying organs.”

Well the bullets DON’T explode. As to saying the bullet will liquefy an organ, IMhO this is over the top hyperbole to dramatize the point they are trying to make,..."

buck460vxr is right. I take it that you don't hunt. I necropsy at bunch of my kills. When you open up a chest cavity and find chunky soup where the lungs (and sometimes heart) were, you get the impression is has all turned to liquid because cohesion between cells has often broken down lung tissue no longer being recognizable as lung tissue. Basically, the structures are broken down so far that you don't have lungs anymore that are identifiable and what is left is in a 'soup' of blood that isn't just blood.

I understand that bullets (typical ammo) does not explode in the actual chemical definition of exploding. Then again, the exploded diagram of my rifle does not fit that definition either. Many bullets do explode is the more common definitional sense that they come apart violently into many fragments. Look it up. His use of the term is not wrong.

Talking about one specific gunshot wound case the doctor stated:
“The bullet had disintegrated his spleen and torn his aorta. Four ribs had essentially turned to dust.”
Once again I, admittedly NOT a medical professional, call into question whether an expanding .223 bullet would turn four ribs of a human being to dust. Again, I suspect the doctor is doing this to demonize “assault weapons”.

I have had this same thing happen countless times where I am unable to recover sections of ribs that have been shattered to the extent that they simply are not discernible anywhere in the surrounding tissue. You could say they turned to dust. You could say they were pulverized and mixed into surrounding body tissues as a mush. Sometimes you can find bone splinters in the mush. Sometimes, they just seem to have been removed from the body because you don't find those sections. They just seem "gone."

Would you have been happy if the doctor provided a highly complex technical explanation for what is happening to these various body tissues? The problem with highly technical explanations is that so many people will not be able to understand them and they can be long and involved. The reporter likely would not have gotten all the technical jargon correct, LOL.

Bullets, passing through the body, do not kill non-violently. That is what makes them good for what we do with them. That the doctor is using such insight is apparently what you see wrong with the information, but the doctor isn't all together wrong. In fact, he is quite right and I would argue that he has sugar-coated (not in the technical confectioner sense, but in the simile sense) some of his descriptions.

Yeah, the doctor had an agenda, no doubt about it, but many of your complaints are without merit.