The Blast Effect
The Washington Post published an article detailing the specifics of the wounds that killed victims in mass shootings, now that AR-15 class weapons1 seem to have become the weapon of choice rather than 9mm handguns.2
Once you get to the end of the article, it makes a point about just how quickly the carnage it’s been describing unfolded.
You have been on this page for 9 minutes and 9 seconds. It took 11 minutes for the shooter to kill 60 people and injure 869 others at a Las Vegas concert.
Short of displaying full colour, high resolution images of the corpses3 I’m not sure how much more the press can do to bring home the scale of the carnage that follows these incidents.
[Via Flowing Data]
A high velocity semiautomatic rifle fed by a magazine, firing much more powerful rounds more rapidly than the 9mm rounds used by handguns.↩︎
No photos of wounds, no blood. 3D models of the victims and of the areas of their bodies damaged by the track of bullets through bodies are used instead.↩︎
Which would prompt a storm of criticism about how invasive and unnecessary such an article’s graphic content was and (conveniently) divert the discussion away from the question of whether a society really needs to make it so easy to have such easy access to lethal weapons.↩︎