Absurd Study Shows Getting Shot Naked is Safer
by Betty Butter • 1 August, 2014 • Guns • 1 Comment
Absurd study of the week: getting shot naked is safer than while clothed
Using deer femurs, they found that a layer of denim made it more likely that a bullet would cause an indirect bone fracture (that is, a bullet causing a bone break without coming into direct contact with the bone). This was because the fabric increased the amount of overall pressure on the tissue at the moment of impact and led to a larger cavity being opened in it.
The direct applications of this finding might seem limited: few people plan their wardrobe (or lack thereof) around the possibility that they might get shot. And clearly, gunshot wounds cause all sorts of trauma besides bone breaks. But the researchers say this work is an important step in understanding the surprisingly overlooked process of how bullets actually damage human tissue.
For the study, the researchers picked up deer femurs at a nearby processing plant and surrounded them in ballistic gelatin — a substance specifically designed to mirror the consistency of human tissue, for research purposes.
Then, they shot the gelatin-covered femurs — either naked, or covered with a single or double layer of denim — while carefully measuring the pressure exerted on the gelatin at the moment the bullet arrived, as well as the velocity of the bullet as it entered and left the fake tissue, and other metrics. But instead of shooting directly at the bone, they shot through the gelatin so that the bullet just barely missed the femur.
They did this because it’s previously been found that in many cases, gunshots actually cause bone fractures indirectly — the pressure caused by an arriving bullet violently opens up a temporary tissue cavity that can break bone. Experiments have determined that bullets passing through tissue 10 millimeters away from the bone can cause fractures in this way.
In this experiment, the denim (whether single or double layer) acted to increase the pressure caused by an arriving bullet. This led to temporary tissue cavities roughly three times as large being ripped open in the clothed femurs, the researchers calculated. And it meant a bullet could pass relatively farther from the femur and still indirectly cause a fracture: bullets passing 20 millimeters away from the bone caused an indirect break in clothed tissue, versus 10 millimeters for unclothed tissue.
Additionally, when comparing clothed and unclothed tissues both hit with bullets passing the same 10 millimeters from the bone, the former group suffered deeper and more complex fractures, with multiple fragments.
So is it really that much better to be shot naked?
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