Even Captain La Garde came to realize that if you want to find out how likely a gun is to stop someone, you are best off trying it on an entity that isn’t already quite permanently stopped. In other words, a live entity.
“The animals selected were beeves about to undergo slaughter in the Chicago stock-yards,” wrote La Garde, deeply perplexing the ten or fifteen people who would be reading his book later than the 1930s, when the word “beeves,” meaning cattle, dropped from everyday discourse.
Sixteen beeves later, La Garde had his answer: Whereas the larger-caliber (.45) Colt revolver bullets caused the cattle to drop to the ground after three or four shots, the animals shot with smaller-caliber .38 bullets failed even after ten shots to drop to the ground. And ever since, the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle, knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready.
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.”[22] 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.[23] 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.
22
I did not ask DeMaio about sheep and the purported similarity of portions of their reproductive anatomy to that of the human female, lest she be forced to draw conclusions about the similarity of my intellect and manners to that of the, I don’t know, boll weevil.
23
MacPherson counters that bullet wounds are rarely, at the outset, painful. Research by eighteenth-century scientist/philosopher Albrecht von Haller suggests that it depends on what the bullet hits.
Experimenting on live dogs, cats, rabbits, and other small unfortunates, Haller systematically catalogued the viscera according to whether or not they register pain. By his reckoning, the stomach, intestines, bladder, ureter, vagina, womb, and heart do, whereas the lungs, liver, spleen, and kidneys “have very little sensation, seeing I have irritated them, thrust a knife into them, and cut them to pieces without the animals’ seeming to feel any pain.” Haller admitted that the work suffered certain methodological shortcomings, most notably that, as he put it, “an animal whose thorax is opened is in such violent torture that it is hard to distinguish the effect of an additional slight irritation.”