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In my book, insanity means an organic mental disease like schizophrenia or paranoid psychosis. Drinking alcohol or taking drugs until one's behavior is out of control is something else.

- Jim

R_Comstock wrote:1) The aforementioned General who survived several years with a LEAD bullet permanently lodged in his heart...and they worry about lead poisoning from paint and pipe solder nowadays.

Many a man has lived a long life with a bullet embedded in his body. The body forms scar tissue around the bullet and renders it inert.

Airborne or waterborne lead is another story. It forms water-soluble compounds that get into the bloodstream and make their way to the nervous system. That is very damaging to fetuses and children. It's unhealthy for adults, too.

A .38 Special revolver holds 6 rounds (I know this has been casually mentioned but I wanted to re-iterate this). This means, the shooter had to reload AT LEAST 5 times!

It was a five-shot revolver, so he reloaded more than six times.

I recently heard about a would-be robber who was shot and killed by 30 rounds from 5 different guns. Here's how the story goes...BG decides he wants to rob a gun store (of all places).

That is a widely circulated, exaggerated version of a real event. The goofball did walk past a police car and try to rob a gun store with a uniformed police officer present. He was shot several times by the store owner and the cop.

The real version is on snopes.com.

- Jim

Thanks for reviving this thread. It's a reminder that handguns are not like Star Trek phasers that make your attackers evaporate every time -- without aiming.

Come to think of it, they're more like Star Wars blasters that rarely seem to harm anyone or damage anything.

- Jim

Five minutes for 30 rounds seems like a reasonable guess.

If the first shot went through the eye or the frontal lobe, the victim likely would not have been able to resist or flee. (An eye injury doesn't kill you, but it sure monopolizes your attention.)

A sober person can reload a revolver without a speedloader in 30 seconds without hurrying.

(A really good shooter can reload with a speedloader so fast you just see a blur, but I also doubt that this guy could do that.)

- Jim

My limited understanding of forensics is that the victim bleeds from injuries that occur while the heart is still beating, and not from those that occur afterward.

Of course, in this case, the defendant did not have an expert witness to contest the findings of the medical examiner.

(That's irrelevant anyway. There's no justification for reloading and shooting someone who is down.)

- Jim

Before you write off the .38 Special (which nearly every law enforcement officer in the country carried for half a century), please keep in mind that the victim apparently did not resist after the first couple of rounds.

The human body has only a few areas where an injury causes sudden death: the heart, major arteries like the aorta and femoral, and the brain stem. Injuries to many other organs, like the lungs, will result in death in half a minute to three minutes.

A man shot a woman in my neighborhood in June, four shots from a .22 rifle. She died in the hospital two weeks later.

- Jim

Two young men in North Carolina spent several days drinking heavily. In the end, one of them shot the other 45 times with a 5-round .38 Special revolver.

During the trial, prosecutors presented evidence that the victim had died some time around the 32nd round. The victim was shot from head to below his belt buckle.

The 24-year-old killer claimed self-defense, mental illness, and intoxication defenses. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

http://www.journalpatriot.com/fullstory.asp?id=875" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

- Jim