From a predictably error-filled ABC News report on scary-looking rifles:
“The way an AR-15 round enters the body … it’s designed to tumble and create a lot of tissue damage,” he said.
This is a deathless urban legend. No, 5.56mm rounds are not “designed to tumble”: The whole point of rifling (the grooves inside a gun barrel) is to make bullets spin so that they do not wobble and tumble — think of a well-thrown football vs. a poorly thrown one — and in that way to make firearms more accurate. That was the big advance from muskets to the “Kentucky rifle.”
As any hunter knows, all bullets can behave in unpredictable ways once they hit something, but the notion of special magic “tumbling” 5.56mm bullets is pure superstition. Without going too deep into the weeds here, there are several parts to a cartridge, and the actual bullet — the projectile that comes flying out of the end of the barrel when a firearm is fired — used in most AR-style rifle ammunition is the same as the bullet that comes out of almost every other .22-caliber centerfire rifle, i.e., a .224-inch bullet. You’ll find these in ammunition for everything from AR-style rifles to hunting rifles in .22-250 Remington and .224 Weatherby. It isn’t some special weird thing — it’s just an ordinary bullet that is a lot like every other bullet.
This kind of “reporting” is dishonest, and it is the sort of thing that would never be accepted in reporting about a subject other than firearms. If some reporter came in with a piece that said the Ford Mustang is an especially dangerous car because it can go 700 miles per hour, some editor would surely ask: Does a Ford Mustang go 700 miles per hour? (Alas, no.) And any self-respecting editor would treat that as something that matters, not as a “technicality.” And if the same reporters and the same publications kept reporting that Ford Mustangs can go 700 mph or fly or bilocate, we might eventually start to suspect that they are not particularly interested in the facts.
As I have shown in many other cases, much of what passes for facts and analysis on this issue is just plain made up. Not exaggerated, not taken out of context, nothing like that: invented.
ABC should stop reporting fiction as though it were news.