Authors: Mary Roach
For the most part, it has been the lowly swine that has borne the brunt of munitions trauma research in the United States and Europe. In China—at the No. 3 Military Medical College and the China Ordnance Society, among others—it has been mongrel dogs that get shot at. In Australia, as reported in the Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Wound Ballistics, the researchers took aim at rabbits. It is tempting to surmise that a culture chooses its most reviled species for ballistics research. China occasionally eats its dogs, but doesn't otherwise have much use or affection for them; in Australia, rabbits are considered a scourge—imported by the British for hunting, they multiplied (like rabbits) and, in a span of twenty years, wiped out two million acres of south Australian brush.
In the case of the U.S. and European research, the theory doesn't hold.
Pigs don't get shot at because our culture reviles them as filthy and disgusting. Pigs get shot at because their organs are a lot like ours. The heart of the pig is a particularly close match. Goats were another favorite, because their lungs are like ours. I was told this by Commander Marlene DeMaio, who studies body armor at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). Talking to DeMaio, I got the impression that it would be possible to construct an entire functioning nonhuman human from pieces of other species. "The human knee most resembles the brown bear's," she said at one point, following up with a surprising or not so surprising statement: "The human brain most resembles that of Jersey cows at about six months."
[1]
I learned elsewhere that emu hips are dead ringers for human hips, a situation that has worked out better for humans than for emus, who, over at Iowa State University, have been lamed in a manner that mimics osteonecrosis and then shuttled in and out of CT scanners by researchers seeking to understand the disease.
Had I been calling the shots back at the War Department, I would have sanctioned a study not on why men sometimes fail to drop to the ground after being shot, but on why they so often
do
. If it takes ten or twelve seconds to lose consciousness from blood loss (and consequent oxygen deprivation to the brain), why, then, do people who have been shot so often collapse on the spot? It doesn't happen just on TV.
I posed this question to Duncan MacPherson, a respected ballistics expert and consultant to the Los Angeles Police Department. MacPherson insists the effect is purely psychological. Whether or not you collapse depends on your state of mind. Animals don't know what it means to be shot, and, accordingly, rarely exhibit the instant stop-and-drop. MacPherson points out that deer shot through the heart often run off for forty or fifty yards before collapsing. "The deer doesn't know anything about what's going on, so he just does his deer thing for ten seconds or so and then he can't do it anymore. An animal with a meaner disposition will use that ten seconds to come at you." On the flip side, there are people who are shot at but not hit—or hit with nonlethal bullets, which don't penetrate, but just smart a lot—who will drop immediately to the ground. "There was an officer I know who took a shot at a guy and the guy just went flat, totally splat, facedown," MacPherson told me. "He said to himself, 'God, I was aiming for center mass like I'm supposed to, but I must have gotten a head shot by mistake. I'd better go back to the shooting range.' Then he went to the guy and there wasn't a mark on him. If there isn't a central nervous system hit, anything that happens fast is all psychological."
MacPherson's theory would explain the difficulties the army had in La Garde's day with the Moro tribesmen, who presumably weren't familiar with the effects of rifles and kept on doing their Moro tribesman thing until they couldn't—owing to blood loss and consequent loss of consciousness—do it anymore. Sometimes it isn't just ignorance as to what bullets do that renders a foe temporarily impervious. It can also be viciousness and sheer determination. "A lot of guys take pride in their imperviousness to pain," MacPherson said. "They can get a lot of holes in them before they go down. I know an LAPD detective who got shot through the heart with a .357 Magnum and he killed the guy that shot him before he collapsed."
Not everyone agrees with the psychological theory. There are those who feel that some sort of neural overload takes place when a bullet hits. I communicated with a neurologist/avid handgunner/reserve deputy sheriff in Victoria, Texas, named Dennis Tobin, who has a theory about this. Tobin, who wrote the chapter "A Neurologist's View of 'Stopping Power' " in the book
Handgun Stopping Power
, posits that an area of the brain stem called the reticular activating system (RAS) is responsible for the sudden collapse. The RAS can be affected by impulses arising from massive pain sensations in the viscera.[
2]
Upon receiving these impulses, the RAS sends out a signal that weakens certain leg muscles, with the result that the person drops to the ground.
Somewhat shaky support for Tobin's neurological theory can be found in animal studies. Deer may keep going, but dogs and pigs seem to react as humans do. The phenomenon was remarked upon in military medical circles as far back as 1893. A wound ballistics experimenter by the name of Griffith, while going about his business documenting the effects of a Krag-Jorgensen rifle upon the viscera of live dogs at two hundred yards, noted that the animals, when shot in the abdomen, "died as promptly as though they had been electrocuted." Griffith found this odd, given that, as he pointed out in the
Transactions of the First Pan-American Medical
Congress
, "no vital part was hit which might account for the instantaneous death of the animals." (In fact, the dogs were probably not as promptly dead as Griffith believed. More likely, they had simply collapsed and looked, from two hundred yards, like dead dogs. And by the time Griffith had walked the two hundred yards to get to them, they were in fact dead dogs, having expired from blood loss.)
In 1988, a Swedish neurophysiologist named A. M. Göransson, then of Lund University, took it upon himself to investigate the conundrum. Like Tobin, Göransson figured that something about the bullet's impact was causing a massive overload to the central nervous system. And so, perhaps unaware of the similarities between the human brain and that of Jersey cows at six months, he wired the brains of nine anesthetized pigs to an EEG machine, one at a time, and shot them in the hindquarters.
Göransson reports having used a "high-energy missile" for the task, which is less drastic than it suggests. What it suggests is that Dr.
Göransson got into his car, drove some distance from his laboratory, and launched the Swedish equivalent of Tomahawk missiles at the hapless swine, but in fact, I am told, the term simply means a small, fast-moving bullet.
Instantly upon being hit, all but three of the pigs showed significantly flattened EEGs, the amplitude in some cases having dropped by as much as 50 percent. As the pigs had already been stopped in their tracks by the anesthesia, it is impossible to say whether they would have been rendered so by the shots, and Göransson opted not to speculate. And if they had lost consciousness, Göransson had no way of knowing what the mechanism was. To the deep chagrin of pigs the world over, he encouraged further study.
Proponents of the neural overload theory point to the "temporary stretch cavity" as the source of the effect. All bullets, upon entry into the human form, blow open a cavity in the tissue around them. This cavity shuts back up almost immediately, but in that fraction of a second that it is agape, the nervous system, they believe, issues a Mayday blast—enough of one, it seems, to overload the circuits and cause the whole system to hang a Gone Fishing sign on the door.
These same proponents believe that bullets that create sizable stretch cavities are thus more likely to deliver the necessary shock to achieve the vaunted ballistics goal of "good stopping power." If this is true, then in order to gauge a bullet's stopping power, one needs to be able to view the stretch cavity as it opens up. That is why the good Lord, working in tandem with the Kind & Knox gelatin company, invented human tissue simulant.
I am about to fire a bullet into the closest approximation of a human thigh outside of a human thigh: a six-by-six-by-eighteen-inch block of ballistic gelatin. Ballistic gelatin is essentially a tweaked version of Knox dessert gelatin. It is denser than dessert gelatin, having been formulated to match the average density of human tissue, is less colorful, and, lacking sugar, is even less likely to please dinner guests. Its advantage over a cadaver thigh is that it affords a stop-action view of the temporary stretch cavity. Unlike real tissue, human tissue simulant doesn't snap back: The cavity remains, allowing ballistics types to judge, and preserve a record of, a bullet's performance. Plus, you don't need to autopsy a block of human tissue simulant; because it's clear, you just walk up to it after you've shot it and take a look at the damage. Following which, you can take it home, eat it, and enjoy stronger, healthier nails in thirty days.
Like other gelatin products, ballistic gelatin is made from processed cow bone chips and "freshly chopped" pig hide.[
3]
The Kind & Knox Web site does not include human tissue simulant on its list of technical gelatin applications, which rather surprised me, as did the failure of a Knox public relations woman to return my calls. You would think that a company that felt comfortable extolling the virtues of Number 1 Pigskin Grease on its Web site ("It is a very clean material"; "Available in tanker trucks or railcars") would be okay with talking about ballistic gelatin, but apparently I've got truckloads or railcars to learn about gelatin PR.
Our replicant human thigh was cooked up by Rick Lowden, a freewheeling materials engineer whose area of expertise is bullets.
Lowden works at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The lab is best known for its plutonium work in the Manhattan (atomic bomb development) Project and now covers a far broader and generally less unpopular range of projects. Lowden, for instance, has lately been involved in the design of an environmentally friendly no-lead bullet that doesn't cost the military an arm and a leg to clean up after. Lowden loves guns, loves to talk about them. Right now he's trying to talk about them with me, a distinctly trying experience, for I keep shepherding the conversation back to dead bodies, which Lowden clearly doesn't enjoy very much. You would think that a man who felt comfortable extolling the virtues of hollow-point bullets ("expands to twice its size and just thumps that person") would be okay talking about dead bodies, but apparently not. "You just cringe," he said, when I mentioned the prospect of shooting into human cadaver tissue. Then he made a noise that I transcribed in my notes as "Olggh."
We are standing under a canopy at the Oak Ridge shooting range, about to set up the first stopping-power test. The "thighs" sit in an open plastic cooler at our feet, sweating mildly. They are consommé-colored and, owing to the cinnamon added to mask the material's mild rendering-plant effluvium, smell like Big Red chewing gum. Rick carries the cooler out to the target table, thirty feet away, and settles an ersatz thigh into the gel cradle. I make conversation with Scottie Dowdell, who is supervising the shooting range today. He is telling me about the pine beetle epidemic in the area. I point to a stand of dead conifers in the woods a quarter mile back behind the target. "Like over there?" Scottie says no. He says they died of bullet wounds, something I never knew pine trees could do.
Rick returns and sets up the gun, which isn't really a gun but a "universal receiver," a tabletop gun housing that can be outfitted with barrels of different calibers. Once it's aimed, you pull a wire to release the bullet.
We're testing a couple of new bullets that claim to be frangible, meaning they break apart on impact. The frangible bullet was designed to solve the "overpenetration," or ricochet, problem, i.e., bullets passing through victims, bouncing off walls, and harming bystanders or the police or soldiers who fired them. The side effect of the bullet's breaking apart on impact is that it tends to do this inside your body if you're hit. In other words, it tends to have really, really good stopping power. It basically functions like a tiny bomb inside the victim and is therefore, to date, mainly reserved for "special response" SWAT-type activities, such as hostage rescue.
Rick hands me the trigger string and counts down from three. The gelatin sits on the table, soaking up the sunshine, basking beneath the calm, blue Tennessee skies—
tra la la, life is gay, it's good to be a gelatin block, I
…
BLAM!
The block flips up into the air, off the table, and onto the grass. As John Wayne said, or would have, had he had the opportunity, this block of gelatin won't be bothering anyone anytime soon. Rick picks up the block and places it back in its cradle. You can see the bullet's journey through the "thigh." Rather than overpenetrating and exiting the back side, the bullet has stopped short several inches into the block. Rick points to the stretch cavity. "Look at that. A total dump of energy. Total incapacitation."
I had asked Lowden whether munitions professionals ever concern themselves, as did Kocher and La Garde, with trying to design bullets that will incapacitate without maiming or killing. Lowden's face displayed the sort of look it displayed earlier when I'd said that armor-piercing bullets were "cute." He answered that the military chooses weapons more or less by how much damage they can inflict on a target,
"whether the target be a human or a vehicle." This is another reason ballistic gelatin tends to get used in stopping-power tests, rather than cadavers. We're not talking about research that will help mankind save lives; we're talking about research that will help mankind take lives. I suppose you could argue that policemen's and soldiers' lives may be saved, but only by taking someone else's life first. Anyway, it's not a use of human tissue for which you're likely to get broad public support.