Bulgarian airbag absorbs semi-automatic rifle round A California woman caught up in a fatal shooting may have been saved by her D-cup breast implants, one of which took a round from a semi-automatic assault rifle, the Los Angeles Times reports. On 1 July last year, Lydia Carranza was working at the front desk of a dentist's office in Simi Valley, north west of Los Angeles. …
Pah! I'm not believing any of their so called findings. Mythbusters 'proved' you couldn't flip a car with jet engines once, using two puny truck mounted turbines. Having failed to do a proper literature search however, they missed Top Gear's far better experiments using a 747.
Bunch of cow boys pretending to do science.
Nothing tries to suggest the round was stopped. Just slowed a little. If the fragments were mm from her vital organs it "could" be that a small reduction in velocity before it broke up was enough to have saved her life.
Nobody is suggesting the implant acted like a bullet proof vest with the round just bouncing off.
First of all, Mythbusters is NOT science, it's a very entertaining TV show that occasionally stumbles into correct science.
Secondly, there is no mention of the calibre of the "assault rifle" (a much overused and frequently inaccurate term, but I digress). There are aftermarket enhancements that can make a .22 rimfire look enough like a top of the line "assault rifle" to confuse your average reporter, etc. There are also plenty of "assault rifles" in pistol calibres which lack the penetrating capability of calibres typically associated with such weaponry (5.56mm and up)
Yes, mythbusters busted the bullet-stopping capability of implants (didn't they use Silicone ones anyway?). However, they didn't measure its effect at REDUCING penetration depth. The round fragmented (obviously, since "fragments" are mentioned), and with the extra inch or so of "high pressure" salt water to penetrate, the fragments didn't penetrate deep enough to kill her (by mere millimeters in this case). Ever see a bullet shot into water? Stops quite quickly. Or didn't you see that Myth Busters of shooting a cube of gel at various angles/depths in water?
Mythbusters also did an episode that showed high velocity rifle shells disintegrate on impact with water, as I imagine they would do with human flesh. The difference is that the water would quickly leech out the energy of the bullet by squirting out of the hole it made, whereas flesh doesn't tend to do that. The water would also absorb most of the initial shockwave and thus reduce the amount of damage the bullet could actually do. The combined effect could theoretically remove enough energy for the bullet to merely embed itself in the chest cavity with relatively little damage, rather than passing right through it and shredding everything on the way.
A high velocity bullet to the breastbone at point blank range = dead. It would shatter like glass.
...that the impact on the liquid combined with multiple phase transitions (air/flesh/solid/water/solid/flesh) broke up the bullet and took enough energy away from the fragments to save her life. Or it could just be a plastic surgeon shooting off his mouth to get a bit of attention. Didn't know plastic surgeons did ballistics as part of their education.
Terminal ballistics is complicated, and there are a lot of tall tales about what bullets do.
Miltary rifle ammunition is designed to disable an enemy soldier who is several hundred metres away. This was at point-blank range.
But high-velocity bullets do some nasty things when they hit flesh, and a lot of nastiness happened in the implant. Yes, it would make a difference.
The only description I can find is that the weapon was a ".30 caibre assault rifle", which covers everything from an AK-47 to an old M1 carbine, and several stocked guns firing pistol rounds. Given the media phobia for even .22 calibre clones of the AK I'd expect any variant to be described as an AK rather than as a ".30 caibre assault rifle". An M1 Winchester .30 carbine round I can believe as being slowed by an implant given that it isn't the hottest of rounds, but the word "fragments" does imply it had either come through some part of the scenary and was already slowed or was broken up on a rib or breastbone. At short range an AK slug would have gone right through the lady even after passing through a plasterboard wall or office divider, unless it hit a large bone. Still, she sounds like a very lucky lady given how worse the affair could have been.
As for Jordan, I suspect a headshot would have a hard time finding anything vital to damage.....
Living, and working in Simi Valley, I remember this day. Namely, because when we (myself and a female colleague) were going out for Indian food for lunch (there's a great little buffet in town) we found the street in front of that dental office blocked off, and had to detour (after getting out and asking people what was going on).
Now, far be it from me to compare the tragedy that occurred that day, and the loss of human life, to the delay that it caused me on arriving to my curry (because it cannot compare, truly), yet I still find it amusing that something from my little town would show up on this site that I've read so regularly for so many years.
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