Is This Serious?

An engineering student from the UK wants to introduce a bullet that has a hemostatic agent in it to keep people from bleeding out. I’m sure criminals will sign right up to use these bullets. I’m sure you’ll have a long line of cops signing up to either use them! I can promise you’ll get a long line of cops lining up to get themselves exempted from any law that mandates them for the serfs.

This greatly misunderstands self-defense. If it’s a less-than-lethal threat, we have less-than-lethal tools at our disposal that we ought to, and are usually legally obligated to use in our defense. When it comes to using deadly force, it’s to defend against someone that is a threat to life and limb. Blood loss from critical places is the key means that causes the threat to not be a threat. It’s a life or death situation, and you’ve decided better your attackers life than yours. It’s not a arm wrestling contest.

We’re providing another degree of lethality or force in comparison to current nonlethals that exist. They don’t penetrate the body and most times are not effective in neutralizing, especially in life-threatening situations. So, we’re trying to bridge the gap by still providing a way to incapacitate like a normal round, but removing that loss of life.

No, you aren’t. Bullets are deadly force. Bullets with hemostatic agents are still deadly force. No one has any business shooting someone with a firearm if they aren’t threatening life and limb. This is not even remotely comparable to non-lethal chemical or electronic weapons. Why don’t you talk to some self-defense experts before you waste your time with this shit. Stay in your lane!

The do-gooders want to save the world. But who will save the world from the do-gooders?

21 thoughts on “Is This Serious?”

  1. hemostatic agents can cause blood clots or foreign material travelling around the body, which can lead to strokes or embolisms in vital organs. If the bullet hits muscle or not vital area, rather than a vital organ, the “cure” could be worse than the disease. Blood thinners treat blood clots, but not the foreign material in hemostatic agent.

    Someone should remind these do-gooders aka asshats that statistically, handgun bullets are only about 20% lethal (according to the CDC) in the first place. To actually kill someone with a handgun, shot placement matters. But with a stroke inducing injection of hemostatic agent deep into the body, maybe not so much anymore.

  2. My 2cents is that NONE of these “students save the world from guns” things are serious. Not a single one of them.

    Every single one of them is students and universities seeing it as a way to virtue signal while getting easy grant money from gullible people.

    1. This is a dumb idea but it’s sad that when anyone tries to make the world better they’re accused of virtue signalling.

      1. Except not a single one of them is trying to make the world better.

        This one at least gets bonus points for not being the yearly n++ of students hook up a solenoid, a fingerprint scanner, and a gun’s trigger… “TO SAVE THE WORLD FROM GUNS!”

  3. I am not aware of any hemostatic agent that would suffice to stop bleeding out in the quantities you could put on any given bullet, also.

    I’m going to be charitable, and say the only goal was “awareness” or something, and not a serious proposal, because thinking about this for 5 seconds should tell them this can’t work at various levels and is dumb.

  4. Another thought. If they were serious, what they’d really be investigating is something more like how to make tasers specifically stimulate the vagus nerve in order to increase the reliability of them producing a true physical stop.

  5. And once again a silly engineering idea that makes no sense in a larger context. This ignores the simple fact that when some one points a gun at some one, the intent is lethal, whether for legitimate defense or illicit crime. This is to much of a hamper on the ability of police and citizen to defend, and criminals will just ignore it.

  6. The truth is in a military context the goal of use of a firearm isn’t necessarily instant death for your target because an injured solder takes several other soldiers out of the fight to transport and treat them, whereas a dead solder is just something to step over and clean up later at your leisure.

    So for the military market I could see this as profitable.

    The downside of this could be that you’re merely going to introduce life threatening thrombosis into gunshot victims more than you’re going to save them.

    1. It would probably be banned under the Hauge Convention. That, however, won’t stop someone from trying.

      Right now the .mil is more worried with range and armor/barrier pen. They have become almost as important as lethality.

      Look at the goals of the M855A1 and recent RFQs for 6.8 and 6.5 rounds.

    2. Sure. And the North Koreans, Viet Cong, and Taliban simply left their wounded behind for us to deal with, since being an American POW guaranteed them orders of magnitude better medical care than they could give their own troops…

      The Pentagon doesn’t operate in the same reality ground troops fight in.

  7. Star Trek DS9 did the opposite of this-the Dominion’s Jem Haddar soldiers fired weapons that deposited anticoagulants in the target. So even fairly minor wounds could cause someone to bleed out.

  8. The reason for this kind of thinking is that too many people in the general non-gun-owning public view shooting someone as some sort of remote controlled punch. I blame television. How many times have you seen someone in a movie get shot in the stomach or shoulder, and then have a full recovery by the next episode?

    1. Next episode?

      I have seen too many movies where the good guy is shot in the shoulder, and makes a full recovery in FIVE MINUTES!

  9. In principle, wasn’t that the intent of mandating FMJ bullets for the world’s militaries?

    Maybe mandating “over-stabilized” FMJ bullets would have the effect sought. (Not that I’m into “mandating” anything.) But I have heard of two incidents of men shot through the chest with .303 British military rounds and surviving with nothing more than first aid quality treatment, and in Vietnam, one of my friends was sitting in his platoon’s tent when a GI walked in and shot their lieutenant five rounds through the upper chest with an M16. The lieutenant survived because at point-blank range the 55 gr. FMJ rounds were still very stable and just poked through cleanly.

    1. I once treated a weapons mech that was shot through the chest with a 20mm cannon shell. Survived, didn’t even need surgery.

      Fortunately he was well within the arming distance when shot.

      When your number is up there is not much you can do about it.

  10. Makes as much sense as a suggestion the Consumer Product Safety Commission came up with to prevent kids drowning in re-purposed 5-gallon buckets: Make them with holes….

  11. Whether the proposal is serious or not, I find the inspiration for the proposal to lack a certain amount of seriousness: if coagulation ammunition will work the way this engineering student thinks it does, then the *only* people who will use it are people like police officers and home owners who will only shoot in self defense. And *they* will only use it if it can be shown that, in addition to saving someone’s life (which is useful because it means that the defender doesn’t have to face murder charges, and has another witness to the shooting to support and/or refute the defender’s self defense claim), it *also* doesn’t interfere with stopping the threat.

    What good would it be to the person getting shot if the coagulation agent works so well, that it takes an average of 10 bullets instead of an average of 5 to neutralize the threat?

    Considering that the event that inspired the engineering student to design these things was one where a person was deliberately trying to kill police officers, it’s hard to see how these bullets are going to help, regardless of their effectiveness. How hard would it be to remove the coagulation agent from the bullets before going on a shooting rampage?

    Having said all this, I can’t wait for the coagulation agent 30-06 bullets. They will make head shots considerably less messy when used in self defense situations!

    1. Cops and home owners will use it because it will be legally mandated, and you can expect it to cost in excess of $2/round.

      Welcome to clown world

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