Yorktown Gun Dealership Should Cease Selling Semiautomatic Weapons
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
I am writing this letter not to take a shot (no pun intended) at a Yorktown politician, but as a grandpa that is deathly afraid that the hate in and around our community will result in a tragedy here at home.
Sanjay Gupta, in his report last year “The Damage to the Human Body Caused by Firearms,” stated “Nearly 30 years after my med school gun range demonstration, Dr. Ernest E. Moore, trauma surgeon and director of Trauma Research at the Shock Trauma Center named after him at Denver Health, is also using the watermelon example to draw a comparison between different firearms.
“I often use the analogy that the injury to the liver (with a semi-automatic rifle) would be similar to just taking a watermelon and dropping it on the cement. It’s incredible the amount of energy delivered…By comparison, the 9-millimeter would drill a hole through the liver. So you’d have a sizeable hole, but if you didn’t hit a major blood vessel, it’s a pretty tolerable injury. In fact, we in civilian trauma will often manage a 9-millimeter liver injury without an operation, whereas a patient with an assault rifle (wound) would be dead within 20 minutes if you didn’t operate,” he said.
Other human tissue in the body reacts differently.
“If you struck a bone with an AR-15, like your femur in your leg, it would literally shatter into multiple fragments that would sort of serve as secondary missiles. Whereas…we’ve seen 9 millimeters that will actually drill a hole right into the femur,” he said.
(An AR-15 is a lightweight semiautomatic – that is, self-loading – rifle manufactured by Colt; other gunmakers make rifles in a similar style.)
Moore also brings up cavitation as a way of visualizing what is happening in the body. He describes cavitation “as the result of a rapid expansion of the tissues surrounding the path of the bullet…in essence, instead of a virtual drill hole with a 9-millimeter, your path of injury in tissue with an AR-15 will be six inches wide. And the path beyond that is even wider, but the tissue recoils back into it,” said Moore, noting that the inelastic tissue – like the liver, heart and brain – are the most vulnerable to this type of energy.
Yorktown Councilman Sergio Esposito is associated with a gun dealership in Yorktown that offers for sale semiautomatic weapons on its website. I am asking for the dealership to stop selling these and other “weapons of war.” We can’t completely stop the savages creating havoc on our schools and communities, but at the very least we could say they weren’t purchased at the American Arms dealership in Yorktown Heights.
Steven Feinstein
Yorktown Heights
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