Holy crap...The Annoyed Man wrote:The injured man's fear of infection is very real, and the doctor's statement that the bullet was probably sterilized by the discharge is vacuous. A friend of mine back CA was a local LEO and at the time I worked in the local trauma center ER. My friend had an ND of his .357 as he was reholstering his weapon in the squad car. He had it drawn for a specific reason, and it discharged as he was reholstering. Anyway, the bullet entered the lateral aspect of his right thigh, about mid-thigh, and exited on the medial aspect of his right knee. Other than skin and muscle tissue, no critical structures where hit. I actually helped treat him in the ER before he was admitted to our hospital. That bullet may or may not have been sterile, but his pants most decidedly were not, and neither was his skin. The bullet spread a large amount (in a microbial sense) of contaminated clothing and skin material throughout the length of the wound channel, and my friend wound up with a raging wound infection which required massive doses of IV antibiotics for about a week before he could go home.
Similarly, when my dad was shot on Iwo Jima, he had a through and through GSW of his left chest wall. The bullet hit him in the solar plexus, was deflected by the button on his jacket, entered his chest wall, and dissected all the way around between his ribs and exited his back next to his spine. It never actually entered the chest cavity or hit any critical structures other than tearing up the musculature of the left side of his chest. But the wound infection nearly killed him.
Unless a round tears up CNS, bowel, heart, or lung tissue, or irreparably destroys major circulatory structures, people who might otherwise survive the wound still have a major risk of pretty severe infections, particularly when hollowpoints in handgun calibers are involved. Those hollow noses drag all kinds of contaminated debris into the wound channel behind them.
