Talk:Gunshot wound

Not notable

This subject of this article is not particularly notable. There’s no legitimate need for every imaginable type of injury to have a dedicated article. Not in any useful encyclopedia anyway...

I've never heard a more nonsensical suggestion in my entire life. It's so much of an important area of medicine that it is specifically important to doctors which work in hostile climates, and is more commonly referred to as Ballistic Trauma. You should really at least think what you would class as important, as although nobody relishes the concept of being shot this is still a very pertinent topic. J O R D A N ^[talk ] 17:13, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Why not? Gunshot injury is common enough that it should be mentioned at least somewhere... Even if the present set of sources on there aren't enough it should be easy enough to find some. It's not like writing up an article about a specific type of injury caused by some obscure machine that was made up one day in someone's basement. mike4ty4 08:43, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, what they said. Wikipedia is not a doctor, or a specifically medical encyclopedia, but WP:NOTE "is not set in stone and should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception." I believe that gunshot wounds (GSWs) should be an exception for the following reasons, for starters:

- a GSW includes at least two injuries (entry and internal) and has plenty of room for more (e.g. exit, fracture, neuro-), not to mention room for various conditions (e.g. catastrophic bleeding, DLOC, paralysis)

- you may consider this an opinion, but a GSW outside of warfare invariably involves negligence, aggression or both

- from the above, it follows that a majority of GSWs require medical aid, and a notable amount require police involvement, be it in the military or the civilian sphere 64.180.216.131 08:47, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 16:27, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

This is bad

This is honestly one of the poorest articles that I have seen on Wikipedia. It is blatantly POV. I will create an account and do an edit or total rewrite if no one else is willing. Here are just a few of my issues.

“In some locations [gunshot injuries], are responsible for more deaths than motor vehicle accidents.” How is this at all relevant? You are comparing total deaths to accidents. For example, total deaths by gunshots includes suicides, but motor vehicles accidents do not take suicides into account. This “statistic” is flawed, misleading, and adds nothing to the article.

“It is important to emphasize that non-fatal gunshot wounds always have severe and long-lasting effects, even after the victim makes a successful recovery.”

This statement is simply false. Many gunshot wounds leave only one scar of comparable size to a pencil eraser, which I would hardly call a “severe effect”. The statement also contradicts itself, since a “successful recovery” would insinuate NO severe, long-lasting effects.

“Non-fatal gunshot wounds result in serious disability.”

Please see above.

“there is no correlation between gun ownership and suicide rates.”

Then why is it relevant to mention it in the article?

This article reads like it was either written by the Brady Campaign, or someone who has poor to zero knowledge on the subject.

It shouldn't really be considered as anything other than a comparative figure, and I only kept it in whilst I was editing because it was the only thing which was referenced correctly in the entire article, but will be removing it I guess. I agree with this notion, as generally even if it were an complementary figure it would require more detail to be of any use to begin with; "x is higher than z" isn't really that revealing when comparing deaths by sheer numbers alone. With regards to the rest of the article, you're correct -- why so many people have the impression that gunshot wounds the size of a tennis-ball is something I can only attribute to over-dramatisation of western action movies.

I will be expanding this article whenever I gain time, so if you do have any suggestions as to which parts require changes, please submit them as soon as possible. Regards, J O R D A N ^[talk ] 20:07, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Any way to survive a gunshot?

On TV it seems that if you get hit with a gunshot in any way, you're screwed. Is there anyway for you yourself to stop the bleeding if you are shot? Invisible NoiseΩ 05:47, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Go to the hospital. 99.141.71.125 (talk) 05:23, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Don't try to remove the bullet, it may be blocking severed arteries which will leak if it is removed. Apply pressure to the wound area to staunch as much bleeding as possible. If the victim shows symptoms of shock, initiate treatment for shock. Tethros (talk) 00:09, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect information regarding severity of bullet wounds

Some of the information in the Severity section falls under popular misconceptions of ballistic trauma. The most pertinent dealing with the size of the bullet and the severity of the wound. To quote James Fallows (1981):

Nearly a century before American troops were ordered into Vietnam, weapons designers, especially in Europe, had made a discovery in the science of "wound ballistics." The discovery was that a small, fast-traveling bullet often did a great deal more damage than a larger round when fired into human or (for the experiments) animal flesh. The explanation lay in physics: when the bullet passed from a medium of one density, such as air, into a medium of different density, the bullet became unstable and began to tumble. This was true for bullets fired through air into water, and it was equally true for bullets as they entered human flesh. What impeded the bullet from tumbling was its own weight and momentum; the lighter the bullet, the more rapidly and wildly it would tumble end-for-end in flesh.

I would suggest amending this article to fall in line with the science of wound ballistics. What do you guys think?

Tethros (talk) 07:45, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Bias in introduction

The stuff about a "public health" approach has nothing to do with ballistic trauma as such. What it is, is a leftover from an approach tried by the anti-gun lobby in the 90s. Define gun violence as an "epidemic" and maybe you could create laws to limit use and ownership of guns on that basis, and do an end-run around the constitutional issue. Needless to say, it didn't work, because while a bacteria or virus just does what it does, guns are only used as a part of a larger human agency. Since this is the case, the you can't go around the constitutional issue on health grounds; constitutionally, the agency is the entire point. In any event, the paragraph should be removed from the introduction because it has nothing to do with ballistic trauma. I'm not a supporter of the right to keep and bear arms, but it distresses me to see a potentially informative article vandalized for political reasons.24.81.25.127 (talk) 04:21, 7 June 2010 (UTC)