Yeah, you know, it's something that some of the mass shooters even explicitly spell out, like, in their manifestos they leave behind, like the shooter in the Buffalo mass shooting just last year. I mean, he specifically said, I chose the AR-15 because it's, you know, very good at killing people...
one of the innovations and one of the things that made it so appealing to the military at first was it has this gas impingement system, which technically, basically, means that it redirects some of the energy from a fired bullet to reload the next bullet. And so there's less recoil, less kick on it. It's easier to keep aim, right? So instead of the front of the rifle kicking upwards with each bullet, it's easier to keep it on a constant target. So it's more accurate.
You know, it doesn't hurt. It's much easier to shoot. One of the things for folks who want to go out and fire 40 or 50 rounds at a range, you know, to do that with their big old hunting rifle, they'll bruise their shoulder after four or five rounds. The AR-15's sort of famously easy to shoot and doesn't have much kick... the AR-15 actually shoots a fairly small bullet. It's known as .223 or a 5.56, you know, these technical details. But it's a fairly small bullet, but it has a lot of powder behind it, gun powder behind it. And so it goes incredibly fast. And with that speed and it's - and how small the bullet is, when it hits a body, it sort of - once it goes in there, it doesn't just go right out the other side.
You know, you referenced some of the work we did, and we had this animation where it showed the difference between getting shot by a typical handgun round, like a 9-millimeter round versus an AR-15 typical round. A handgun round will go clear through you, that sort of pinhole on both sides. But when an AR-15 round typically hits you, it goes - makes that small entry wound, but then inside, it creates this shockwave, this blasting pattern that blows out the back side of people, causes internal injuries, and it's just devastating.
