I am new to this forum and looking for some answers

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secondlife

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Gentlemen: I have been wondering for many years about an assault with a 44 caliber gun which was perpetrated on me. As you know, good guys get shot too.
In any case, I was shot with a 44 cal. from about 4 feet away. The round went through my left arm and into my chest. I do not know if it touched the humerus but it must have touched one of my ribs as it entered my chest. From my reading online I know 44 cal. is a bullet with much force and should have exited my body. However it hit my lung, spleen, stomach and ended in my spine... Do you have any ideas as to why such powerful round would not just continue straight after being slightly defected by the rib? Someone once told me the ammo could have been old. Your knowledgeable answers would be highly appreciated.
 
Depends on a lot of factors. MV, bullet construction, what it actually hit in your arm. When all of the factors can be evaluated and compartmentalized and compared against the bullet path, a very good estimate of the entrance velocity can be approximated. .44 spl and .44 mag are different cartridges, and there are others as well.
 
A little background info that may help your search for understanding...

1) "Caliber" (as in, .44 caliber) refers to the diameter of the bullet. It does not refer to the power of the round -- except sometimes, in informal speech.

2) .44 caliber bullets can be propelled by a round that uses a lot of powder (Magnum), a medium amount of powder (Special), or just a little bit of powder (Russian). Powder = power, so each of these rounds would have different levels of power in actual use.

3) The bullet from all of these loadings would look the same when it was removed from its target. The more powerful loads might distort the bullet more, but then again might not. And without a different bullet that had travelled the same path for comparison, it's unlikely someone would be able to glance at just the one bullet and say for sure which type of round had powered it.

Hope this helps.

pax
 
thank you

I think it explains it for me. What is a typical use for such bullet with less powder. Could this have a profile for the shooter or would someone just randomly choose these rounds?
 
First, we are happy to hear that you survived and seem to be in good health.

As others noted, ".44 caliber" (44/100 inch) indicates the bullet diameter; over the years, bullets of that diameter have been loaded into cartridges ranging from those used in very high power rifles, to small cartridges used in small and easily concealed handguns.

Second, is where someone is hit by the bullet. The human body is not uniform, unlike a bowl of jello. Bullets are deflected by striking bone or even by soft tissue, which anyone who has carved a roast knows is not uniform. So many factors can cause a bullet to be turned from its path, often several times in a given incident. In one case I read about, a .22 bullet struck a man in the stomach and exited the body about 3 inches from the entrance wound, after making a "U-turn" in the body. In another, a .45 caliber bullet (.45 ACP) entered the rear of the neck, under the skull, followed the inside curve of the skull around and exited above the left eye. The wound was not only not fatal, but the victim left the hospital with nothing more than a severe headache.

While such incidents are rare, they make it difficult to be too dogmatic about the performance of bullets in the body.

Jim
 
makes sense

but not necessarily what happened in my case.
I had a 9mm which I drew but the element of surprise was on the opposing side and he was quicker.
Thanks for your replies.
 
To look at it another way, say you get hit by a truck. When you wake up in the hospital, they tell you it was a half ton pickup truck.

What happens when you get hit at 25mph is not the same as if the truck hit you doing 70mph.

Not a perfect analogy, I hope you get the point. Same size "truck" different speeds, different damage (penetration).
 
Cirquitious paths with bullets are pretty common.
There is significant energy in the spin of the bullet as there is in the forward motion. Hitting an item of different viscosity or density like body parts, can cause either energy to deflect in any direction: You don't have to be a solid object. Lookup ricochet on water on YouTube and you'll see some serious redirection of bullets with water, i.e. what your body is made of.
I'll post a video of tracers into water shortly, showing a couple inches of water can make a bullet make a 60 degree turn.
 
Congrats on making through the traumatic experience. Like other have said there are a couple of different 44 caliber rounds out there.

I would guess that the bullet hitting your arm first greatly reduced the trauma in your abdomen. The link below is a video that shows a 44 Magnum bullet shooting into a row of water balloons. Once the bullet makes it through the first balloon the velocity drops off very quickly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blGNsJl7Ku8
 
Being in the medical field for many years as an imaging specialist and working with trauma patients with gun shots I got to see the path the bullet takes when it enters and exits if it does exit at all. The bullet will always travel the path of less resistance.

Most of us including myself might have soft bellies now after sitting in front of the computer monitor for many hours but our insides especially our organs such as lungs, spleens, and kidneys are very dense and heavy unlike our beer bellies.

According to your description the bullet seems to to have entered from a side view or rotated view. You had two entry sites. One on your arm and one on your chest. Buy the time it exited your arm, the velocity of the bullet had slowed down considerably but still had enough energy and velocity to enter again, that being your chest. Once it hit the flesh and muscle in the chest that slowed it down again, if it hit ribs that slowed it down again, if it hit your lungs that slowed it down even more because it is like you trying to run through mud and water. By the time it hit your spine the bullet had expanded all its energy and the spine was like a steel wall and sponge causing the bullet to stop there and absorbing the remainder of the energy.

You might not see it as luck, but luckily no arteries were hit or the outcome would have been different regardless if the bullet was a 44 or a 22 lr.
 
very interesting

thank you for your reply. I just could not imagine a round going at such a speed being slowed down so much by each organ. Actually, since you are a medical person- I was told that they had to pump some 20 units of blood before I was stabilized. Most people have no idea what guns can do. By the way, the round had enough energy by the time it reached the spine to perforate it and get lodged in the spinal canal. It damaged the cord but did not sever it. A week after the first surgery they went in to remove the round and had to use something like a metal detector to locate it.
That youtube video with the balloons filed with water was eye opening for me.
Thanks for the link.
 
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I one time shot a Mule deer buck broadside in the chest. Upon examining the carcass I found no exit wound.

The round I was firing was a 30-06 with a handload (homemade) of 180gr. roundnose Remington core-lock bullet, going at about 2700fps. The shot was taken at a little over a hundred yards.

I found the bullet lodged in the front leg knee of the deer. It somehow turned downward in the chest area and went strait down the inside of the leg.

I've shot a dozen other deer and a few elk with the same 30-06, all of which the bullet went clean through, even on one occasion at 413 yards.

Bullets do strange things sometimes.
 
I too am glad to see that you have recovered from that very traumatic and life threatening incident..

Having said that, unlike some of the above posters, I am not an expert in much of anything except driving a truck. But I have seen bullets take some crazy paths on deer in my lifetime. It's hard to fathom why a bullet does what it does and goes where it goes as they sometimes seem to defy physics. What you experienced is a pretty common phenomenon.

I would add that compared to a high powered sporting rifle (say a 270 Win) the 44 magnum (if that's what hit you) is pretty slow moving and dare I see much less powerful. I have noted clean pass-throughs shooting deer with my 270, smallish hole going in with a much larger exit and alot of damage to the boiler room in between. I don't put it in such terms to offend you or downplay your injuries, so I hope you don't take it that way. But what I'm getting at is that in some cases, it seems that slower moving bullets (relatively speaking) seem to deflect and take crazy paths easier than much faster moving bullets with higher sectional densities. This has only been my limited experience thus far, and I am not asserting that this is 100% predictable. Sometimes the path a bullet takes within the target is still unpredictable despite the shooter making an educated decision on the type of bullet that will be used and for what purposes.
 
The 20 units of blood sounds about right, depending on how long it took from the time you got shot, to the time the EMT or ambulance arrived, to the time you were actually at the trauma center or hospital. The loss of blood comes from capillaries and veins destroyed by the type of bullet used as described before. The bullet used on you could have been one used for control penetration or a frangible which explains also why it did not go through.

Upon impact the disruption that occurs to the surrounding tissue is massive, so your bleeding comes from the capillaries and veins and arteries that provide blood to all of our body. In this case it is very possible that an artery was missed and if not, if it was hit, it is was a smaller artery.

Possibly the surrounding tissue and your clotting factors in your blood may have stopped some of the most serious bleeding long enough for you to survive for you to get medical attention.

Regardless, with that amount of blood loss you would not have survived much longer. An arterial bleed would have caused death by exsanguination, or loss of blood that much faster, depending on the artery at a minimum just a couple of minutes.

The EMT guys that got to you were phenomenal and very skilled to have you stay alive that long. They stabilized you long enough so that the doctors could do their part. Im sure they plugged the bullet entrance with some sort of airtight petroleum gauze, this along with the pressure created by gravity from the outside and the pressure created in your body as you bled internally also created a lot of blood clots and pressure that also slowed down your bleeding.

This type of stuff I learned when I went through the army medic program years ago.

Good luck on your recovery. The true test God puts on us is how we choose to respond to the pain we feel or inflict to others.
 
Howdy

Quite a story, glad you survived.

Here is a photo of four different 44 caliber revolver cartridges.

From left to right they are 44 Russian, 44 Special, 44 Magnum, and 44-40.

The 44 Russian is the oldest cartridge here, it dates from around 1871 when Smith and Wesson had a contract with Russia and eventually supplied about 150,000 revolvers to the Czarist government. The Russians specified the design of the cartridge, it originally held about 23 grains of Black Powder and fired a soft lead 256 grain bullet. Muzzle velocity from a 7" barrel would have been around 700 feet per second.

The next cartridge in line is the 44 Special, sometimes also known as the 44 S&W Special. Smith and Wesson introduced this cartridge in 1908 with a newly designed revolver sometimes known as the Triple Lock. The 44 Special is basically the same cartridge as the 44 Russian, all dimensions are the same with the exception that the brass case is about 1/10" longer. Because the case was slightly longer, the 44 Special held slightly more Black Powder, about 26 grains. Soon after it was introduced the powder used in the 44 Special cartridge was changed over to modern Smokeless Powder. Muzzle velocity of modern 44 Special ammunition can vary widely from 700 feet per second up to about 900 feet per second. Modern bullets vary in weight too, from about 200 grains to about 250 grains.

The third cartridge from the left is a 44 Magnum. This is a devastatingly powerful cartridge. It was introduced in 1955 by Remington for a new revolver developed by Smith and Wesson. This cartridge and revolver were made famous in the 1971 Clint Eastwood movie Dirty Harry. At the time it was the most powerful handgun cartridge in the world. The round pictured is a Remington round with a 180 grain Jacketed Soft Point bullet. The advertised velocity is 1610 feet per second.

The 44-40 cartridge all the way on the right is from a different family of cartridges. The name refers to the fact that the bullet was 44 caliber, and the cartridge originally held 40 grains of Black Powder. The 44-40 is also known as the 44 WCF which stands for 44 Winchester Center Fire. This cartridge was introduced by Winchester in 1873 for the Model 1873 lever action rifle. In 1878 Colt chambered the Single Action Army revolver for the 44-40 cartridge. Many revolvers and rifles were chambered for the 44-40 over the years, but until recently it was pretty much an obsolete cartridge without many commercial sales. That changed a few years ago when Western style shooting became popular and 44-40 is again available as loaded ammunition. 44-40 bullets can vary in weight from about 200 grains to about 225 grains. Velocity can vary from about 700 feet per second up to about 900 feet per second.

44%20Russian%2044%20Special%2044%20Magnum%2044-40_zpskpxnkpkf.jpg


I suspect the cartridge that was used against you was probably a 44 Special.

44 Russian is pretty outmoded and although it is being commercially loaded again, and it can be fired in any revolver that will fire 44 Special or 44 Magnum, it is not commonly available very many places.

44 Magnum is so powerful that I doubt you would have survived a chest wound from it.

44-40 is pretty much a specialty cartridge today, and although there were many rifles and revolvers chambered for it over the years, commercially loaded ammunition is not commonly available over the counter. Also, 44-40 ammunition cannot be fired in a firearm chambered for any of the other three cartridges we have discussed.

Although there are not many revolvers chambered for 44 Special any more, there were many thousands of them built over the years, and any modern 44 Magnum revolver will also fire 44 Special ammunition. There are still a few relatively inexpensive, short barreled revolvers being made that are fairly easy to conceal and are specifically designed to fire the 44 Special cartridge.


There were other early 44 caliber revolver cartridges such as the 44 Henry, 44 S&W American, and the 44 Colt, but those are all antique cartridges for antique firearms and I doubt a modern criminal would have used a firearm chambered for one of these cartridges.
 
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To Driftwood Johnson, just like to say that that was very well written, informative, and succinct explanation of the families of 44 calibers . Great job!
 
Eghads, you are one lucky fellow.
Glad you recovered and can share your story.
If there's one consistent truth about guns and ammo, it's that there's nothing consistent about guns and ammo.
No telling what the results will be with any caliber.
Better luck to you in the future.
 
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