View Full Version : Because .22s bounce around inside the skull..
Rampant Colt
05-17-11, 20:27
Lately it seems nearly every forum i go on there is someone who insists on using a .22LR for self-defense because they claim that the bullet "will bounce around inside the body like a pinball" (or inside the skull)
Where did this originate from? Mob hitmen? Isræli Mossad? History Channel? I remember watching a show on A&E about the psycho hitman, Richard Kuklinski, and he claimed he used .22s and .25s for mob hits for that very reason.
If the bullet has enough energy and momentum to bounce around the skull or body, wouldn't it stand to reason that the bullet would continue in a straight line unless deflected slightly off-course by bone..?
Nephrology
05-17-11, 20:44
It originates in the bottom 6th empty can of bud light, some place, some time, long, long ago....
The way the original story goes, or so I've been told, is as follows:
The .22 has enough energy to enter the skull (body is another variation, but I always heard "skull" back home in SC), but not enough to exit. Also, so the claims always went, the fact that most mob hits were execution-style, the gunshots would go in from the rear of the skull and wouldn't have enough mass or velocity to generate the force required to punch through the thick frontal bone of the skull.
I'm no ballistics expert like the good Doctor is, and I've never had any desire to test the theories. However, the second portion of what I wrote does seem to be based in enough medical truth for me to somewhat believe.
Considering the frontal bone of the skull is the thickest and strongest bone in the skull, I could see how it would be hard for a small projectile to manage to perforate after dumping a considerable amount of energy via the initial penetration of the occipital portion of the skull and the subsequent route through the meninges and brain tissue.
H
I have seen pics of some truly wierd entrance and exit wounds from 22lr. Not to say those characteristics are specific to the 22lr caliber.
I would guess the biggest reason people thing 22lr bounces inside the body is because the projectile is small enough to be moved around the body by the circulatory system if it comes to rest and a vein or artery of sufficient size. Bird and buckshot can do the same thing. Big blood vessel plugging hunks of lead floating around in your blood can kill you even if the GSW didnt.
I've seen multiple autopsies of gunshot victims from 22 LRs. One thing they DO is fragment dramatically and it's a mess. I've seen the "bounce" off ribs and spine.
Don't know about the urban legend, but it's a nasty round internally.
...[B]ut it's a nasty round internally.
Aren't all rounds nasty once they are allowed to do their jobs?
H
I've seen the "bounce" off ribs and spine.
Im sure you would agree deflect is probably a more correct term.
The angle of deflection can be extreme under certain conditions i guess. I cant think of anything specific but i know i saw pictures in medic class that seemed to defy common logic on how a GSW should be
The first suicide I ever responded to was a guy that shot himself in the forehead with a .22 pistol. The bullet entered the front of the skull and went in a perfectly straight line 3/4 to 7/8 of the way through the brain. The bullet was in one piece but it was smooshed. Just another one for the "it won't necessarily do the same thing every time" file.
Nephrology
05-17-11, 21:37
OK, OK, let me give you a slightly more thorough answer as to why that simply isn't the case.
For something to bounce, there must both a medium too hard for the projectile in question to penetrate and there to exist sufficient energy for the projectile to accelerate in the opposite direction.
Thus, for a projectile to bounce, it must both encounter a barrier of such density that it cannot penetrate, and still maintain sufficient energy after impact to be redirected in another direction.
Thus for a bullet to actually "bounce" inside the principle cavities of the human body (intracranial, thoracic, abdominopelvic) it would not only need to encounter bone of sufficient thickness to deflect a bullet, but it would also somehow have to retain enough energy to change direction and continue on to another path.
Unpredictable combinations of angles, bullet types, velocities, materials (both of the projectile and the target) can cause all sorts of outcomes in terms of ballistic performance but bouncing is not going to be one of them.
Im sure you would agree deflect is probably a more correct term.
The angle of deflection can be extreme under certain conditions i guess. I cant think of anything specific but i know i saw pictures in medic class that seemed to defy common logic on how a GSW should be
Deflection is indeed a much better word.
Given the low impulse of the .22, I doubt that the .22LR possesses the ability to be deflected more than once or twice before coming to rest inside the human body.
The use of the phrase "....bounce around inside the body like a pinball" carries with it the implication that there will be several (perhaps three or more?) such "deflections"; an improbable terminal ballistic scenario to say the least.
Sounds like an episode for the "MythBusters" if you ask me. :D
Back when I was in graduate school I worked in the regional tertiary University hospital morgue and the Circuit Medical Examiners office harvesting human tissues for transplant.
Gunshot homicide or suicide victims are usually a pretty good source of viable transplant organs depending on age, gunshot location, etc.
Anyways, there were quite of number of .38 Special, .357 Mag, .25 ACP, .32, 9mm. .45ACP and .380 ACP bodies that ended up on the slab in the autopsy room that I recovered transplant organs from, but very few .22 or .22 MAG unless the .22 ended up in the CNS.
That was primarily due to the fact that the .22 and .22MAG round did ricochet all over inside the body exiting at some other far placed location away from the entrance wound and the subject subsequently died a week or two later from complications due to infection, thereby making their organs a no-go for transplant.
Ive been to a few scene where bullets, not just .22, have done some major deflecting.
Best example was a drug dealer that got shot during a robbery. He was ducking behind a car and the gunman was on the other side of the car. Round was a Remington Golden Saber .45 ACP, unsure on the weight. Round hot the guy in the side of the head above his temple, deflected downward, exited his cheek, entered his chest at his collar bone, travelled down and deflected off one of the bottom ribs and then traveled across his body downward to the opposite hip.
I was astonished by the amount of distance that round traveled.
Also had a guy that accidentally shot his girlfriend in the face with a Jennings .22. Round hit her in the upper lip, went through the upper jaw and then embedded itself in her spine. That round went through some thick bone and still traveled a good bit even though it came out of a short barrel.
Shawn Dodson
05-18-11, 11:37
A .22 LR bullet is composed of soft lead. It also has a rounded nose. Both of these features allow the bullet to be easily deflected when it collides at an angle with bone.
If the bullet collides at an angle with the internal surface of the cranium and is deflected it will ride against cranial bone until it stops, like a car will ride against a guard rail on a curve.
The same is true if the bullet collides at an angle with rib bones.
Bullets do weird things when they enter living flesh. Thirty years ago my father was shot point blank underneath the chin with a .22lr pistol and the bullet ended up lodged in his spine between his shoulder blades.......where it still sits today. It didn't kill him or paralyze him, however the bullets sits it a weird spot close enough to his spinal cord that the doctors decided to leave it there. Its really weird in that the gun was pointed to the ceiling so you'd think the shot would have continued up into his head, however it hit something which made it take a u turn and go back down into his back/spine.
Moral of the story is "Bullets do wonky shit once they hit wetpack."
H
Glock17JHP
05-18-11, 13:32
Keep this in mind... a .22 LR bullet will only travel so far in soft tissue. Hitting anything going in (bone, etc.) will lessen that distance, as will hitting anything unusual during its path of penetration. Yawing will also DRAMATICALLY reduce the penetration distance. Also, keep in mind that a typical round-nosed .22 LR will penetrate quite a bit further than a .22 LR HP, if latter projectile expands properly.
In reality, there can be so much variation in this, depending on the tissues/materials struck and the specific projectle, weapon, bullet strike angle and velocity. It may not do a lot of good to discuss it, really? :confused:
In my experience, .22MAG was by far the absolute worst of this - you could get shot in the left eye and the bullet would exit your right toe....
We've seen enough accounts of .32 and .380 failing to penetrate the skull. Forget about .22 unless for whatever reason that is the only weapon you have.
Plus there is the issue of hitting the skull in a gunfight. A lot of people miss hitting the entire assailant.
Then there is the inevitable talk of hitmen and Massad hit teams and such. There is no resemblance from either of these situations to defensive shootings. You don't get to close the distance to a few feet of an unsuspecting person and draw your gun and empty it into his face, nor do you get to shoot someone in the back of the head who is tied up and forced to their knees.
Somewhere around here I have a photo from an autopsy that shows a permanent cavity of a .22 that penetrated the skull and traveled to the other side, where it bounced off the skull interior and penetrated about halfway across the brain at a new angle.
I once did CPR on a patient who'd been shot with a 12ga Foster-style slug. The entrance wound was on the right hip at midline, and the exit on the left hip at midline.
The weird thing was the path the slug had taken - a big arc through the liver, diaphragm, both lungs, spleen, and of course a whole lot of intestines.
Very little external bleeding - but palpating the carotid arteries during compressions felt like a stream of bubbles going by.
Bottom line - round-nosed bullets with sufficient remaining energy can take weird paths.
Failure2Stop
05-19-11, 08:07
The first time I can recall hearing the ".22s bounce around inside the skull" story was in the movie "My Blue Heaven", with Steve Martin IIRC.
I regard the information with the same degree of sincerity as I do with most other late-80s comedies.
In my experience, .22MAG was by far the absolute worst of this - you could get shot in the left eye and the bullet would exit your right toe....
With all due respect, this is bullshit, and exactly what this thread is about.
A .22mag might deviate inside a body, and they do tend to yaw, especially in the FMJ loads or when launched from handguns, but can you explain to us how a .22mag can penetrate from the top of a person to the bottom when average penetration is in the area of 8-15"?
'll even give you a very short person, say 4' tall, and you math still doesn't add up.
Nobody_Special
05-19-11, 09:24
Ive been to a few scene where bullets, not just .22, have done some major deflecting.
Best example was a drug dealer that got shot during a robbery. He was ducking behind a car and the gunman was on the other side of the car. Round was a Remington Golden Saber .45 ACP, unsure on the weight. Round hot the guy in the side of the head above his temple, deflected downward, exited his cheek, entered his chest at his collar bone, travelled down and deflected off one of the bottom ribs and then traveled across his body downward to the opposite hip.
I was astonished by the amount of distance that round traveled.
Also had a guy that accidentally shot his girlfriend in the face with a Jennings .22. Round hit her in the upper lip, went through the upper jaw and then embedded itself in her spine. That round went through some thick bone and still traveled a good bit even though it came out of a short barrel.
There was a second shooter on the grassy knoll
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Well if you are looking for hard evidence of "bounces" in the head from .22 LRs, you can consult Vincent Di Maio's book "Gunshot Wounds" or Malcolm Dodd's book "Terminal Ballistics."
They have had adequate experience of these from a pathologist's point of view to mention the phenomenon in print.
Glock17JHP
05-19-11, 13:12
In my experience, .22MAG was by far the absolute worst of this - you could get shot in the left eye and the bullet would exit your right toe....
Yeah... and your foot would have to be in your mouth for that to happen, huh??? :jester:
I think there was a chain of events that got all this started. So far I see talk of agencies like the OSS, KGB, and such using suppressed 22s for assassinations going way back, from there I wouldn't be surprised if that extended to some information leaking of reports of it bouncing around, these reports getting into the hands of people who think its cool and either fabricate hit man stories or hit man actually did it.
I really do think it probably came from something else (using suppressed 22s for the low report) and then discovering it can "bounce around" and going from there to being used for it, alternatively it could be that someone just speculated 22s were used for assassinations for this reason and it caught on.
This is pretty much all rumor mill stuff. In the end the answer might just be at the bottom of a sixth beer a long long time ago.
I really do think it probably came from something else (using suppressed 22s for the low report) and then discovering it can "bounce around" and going from there to being used for it, alternatively it could be that someone just speculated 22s were used for assassinations for this reason and it caught on.
Both of my uncles told stories from Vietnam about suppressed .22 pistols being used to kill dogs. My one uncle (Army) has one to this day that he says he keeps for "just in case."
H
Yeah... and your foot would have to be in your mouth for that to happen, huh??? :jester:
No, I just stated that in my personal experience in the morgue with gunshot wounds, the .22 Mag deflected and zig-zagged off bones more than any other round.
Specifically, the ER physicians hated that round more than any other because of the multiple paths it would take throughout the body.
Both of my uncles told stories from Vietnam about suppressed .22 pistols being used to kill dogs. My one uncle (Army) has one to this day that he says he keeps for "just in case."
H
Puts some validity to my idea it could of escalated from something else and turned into an urban legend and/or actual practice.
Is there actually any hard core evidence of mobsters and such using 22LRs much at all? Most mob hits I know about seem to scream massive force and violence.
Anyhow on to morgue stories. Not saying anyone is making things up but I find it rather peculiar that morticians have a lot of hands on experience with certain rounds. I mean 22LR is common enough in murders, same with 9mm, 45, and all that jazz but something like a 22 magnum? not that its an obscure cartridge but I just don't see it as a high weapon of choice to constantly be encountered in murders to have an individual get a lot of experience with it. I bet experts who write the books on this gather facts from morgues all over but an individual mortician? perhaps I am missing something.
Puts some validity to my idea it could of escalated from something else and turned into an urban legend and/or actual practice.
Is there actually any hard core evidence of mobsters and such using 22LRs much at all? Most mob hits I know about seem to scream massive force and violence.
My grandfather (before he passed) used to get everyone together for holidays and those of us who hadn't yet enlisted or seen combat would listen to the war stories of those who had. If my uncle's stories are even half true, his platoon would have cut the canine population in Vietnam by about 20%. Which would explain why that area of the world tends to eat them..:jester:
I have no evidence of my own that mafioso have used or are using the .22 LR for execution-style homicides. But in a city like Philly, the scumbags tend to use whatever they can get their filty mitts on to kill folks.
H
Puts some validity to my idea it could of escalated from something else and turned into an urban legend and/or actual practice.
Is there actually any hard core evidence of mobsters and such using 22LRs much at all? Most mob hits I know about seem to scream massive force and violence.
Anyhow on to morgue stories. Not saying anyone is making things up but I find it rather peculiar that morticians have a lot of hands on experience with certain rounds. I mean 22LR is common enough in murders, same with 9mm, 45, and all that jazz but something like a 22 magnum? not that its an obscure cartridge but I just don't see it as a high weapon of choice to constantly be encountered in murders to have an individual get a lot of experience with it. I bet experts who write the books on this gather facts from morgues all over but an individual mortician? perhaps I am missing something.
Hmm, I don't remember stating that I spent all those years in graduate school to become a mortician? :bad:
I was at Jackson Memorial Hospital at the University of Miami and at Shands Teaching Hospital at the University of Florida becoming a Molecular Geneticist in Human Gene Therapy working with Dr. Herman Baer the Chairman of the Pathlogy department developing Human Forensic Diagnostic DNA technology, where the #1 most prolific caliber of shooting victims was a .22 long rifle.
Like I stated previously, .22MAG was the most feared caliber by our Emergency Room Physicians due to its prolific tendency to ricochet off to distant parts of the human body far away from the entry wound.
Just stating my personal first hand experience in a couple of large medical center morgues with a large clientele of homicidal and suicidal victims, take it or leave it for what it is, not what it isn't.
SkyPup--Thank you for your comments; it is always good to have real world observations injected into conversations.
Raven Armament
05-20-11, 14:06
Is there actually any hard core evidence of mobsters and such using 22LRs much at all?
Not so much "mobsters" but other gun-for-hire types whose interrogation videos I've seen is the .22LR is enough to kill at close range and even unsuppressed is quiet enough not to be too noticed in public. Suppressed is even quieter (of course) but suppressors weren't used as much as Hollywood portrays.
Hmm, I don't remember stating that I spent all those years in graduate school to become a mortician? :bad:
I was at Jackson Memorial Hospital at the University of Miami and at Shands Teaching Hospital at the University of Florida becoming a Molecular Geneticist in Human Gene Therapy working with Dr. Herman Baer the Chairman of the Pathlogy department developing Human Forensic Diagnostic DNA technology, where the #1 most prolific caliber of shooting victims was a .22 long rifle.
Like I stated previously, .22MAG was the most feared caliber by our Emergency Room Physicians due to its prolific tendency to ricochet off to distant parts of the human body far away from the entry wound.
Just stating my personal first hand experience in a couple of large medical center morgues with a large clientele of homicidal and suicidal victims, take it or leave it for what it is, not what it isn't.
I am by no means trying to discredit you, just it seems in these conversations I hear things that don't seem like it would be a common enough occurrence to establish a solid base of fact on experience. So I am just wondering, mostly in general not directed at you, how much of first hand accounts come from something like a large hospital that gets a lot of experience in gunshot victims to see enough wounds by X round to be able to best determine how it acts vs how many work at a small hospital and see 2-3 with round X and make a judgment off that.
Raven: The stories I've heard of suppressed 22s being used for assassinations were about government agencies like OSS, KGB, and those types. When it turns to the mob it turns into "bouncing around the skull". I am wondering if there could be a connection between the two.
I am by no means trying to discredit you, just it seems in these conversations I hear things that don't seem like it would be a common enough occurrence to establishing a solid base of fact on experience. So I am just wondering, mostly in general not directed at you, how much of first hand accounts come from something like a large hospital that gets a lot of experience in gunshot victims to see enough wounds by X round to be able to best determine how it acts vs how many work at a small hospital and see 2-3 with round X and make a judgment off that.
Raven: The stories I've heard of suppressed 22s being used for assassinations were about government agencies like OSS, KGB, and those types. When it turns to the mob it turns into "bouncing around the skull". I am wondering if there could be a connection between the two.
Even a large hospital is not going to provide what you're looking for. No two shootings are likely to be the same even with the same bullet/gun combination. There are to many variables.
Yesterday I was discussing the topic of 22 LR wounds with one of my best friends, a peripheral vascular surgeon with vast experience but most probably not as many GSW treated as some emergency docs in USA. He confirmed the 22 is notorious for deflecting inside the body, sometimes leaving the strangest bullet paths. Many cases of a small entry wound, no exit wound, and extremely difficult to track bullet path and difficult to assess internal damage, at least in the short term.
.22's can indeed be nasty...
Yesterday I was discussing the topic of 22 LR wounds with one of my best friends, a peripheral vascular surgeon with vast experience but most probably not as many GSW treated as some emergency docs in USA. He confirmed the 22 is notorious for deflecting inside the body, sometimes leaving the strangest bullet paths. Many cases of a small entry wound, no exit wound, and extremely difficult to track bullet path and difficult to assess internal damage, at least in the short term.
That is exactly correct and that is why large metro ER docs prefer to see victims shot with large caliber weapons because either the victim is DOA or they will be able to most likely patch him up, not so easily done with the little .22s which create much more agony and infections a week after their arrival to the ER.
KiloSierra
05-22-11, 22:25
Integrally suppressed High Standard Model HD's were used by OSS personnel in WWII for clandestine purposes. They were allegedly used for the same purpose by CIA and military personnel at least until the 80's. Allegedly integrally suppressed Ruger's are also used now.
I really don't think it has anything to do with the .22's power level or wounding capacity. It has more to do with the fact that a suppressed .22 pistol can be about the same size as a non-suppressed 9mm/.40 S&W/.45 Auto service pistol, the ammo is cheap and readily available, they were first made and used when suppressors for larger weapons were extremely large and bulky and had short service life's compared to suppressed .22's and the people who are in the habit of using them don't feel like changing or have actual reasons not to, and people spend to much time learning techniques from movies and TV.
That is exactly correct and that is why large metro ER docs prefer to see victims shot with large caliber weapons because either the victim is DOA or they will be able to most likely patch him up, not so easily done with the little .22s which create much more agony and infections a week after their arrival to the ER.
This sums it up for me. 22's are more likely to deflect, making the ER doc's job more difficult because they cannot reasonably assume a straight wound. It does not mean that a 22 is a good choice for a defensive round.
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