Over the years we have had many debates with Courtney, mainly on other boards.
When he first showed up on TacticalForums, everyone greeted him warmly and we were all receptive to his research.
It soon turned out that he was doing things backwards. He had arrived at a conclusion and was collecting disparate references to support it. What the pay-off would be if he got the theory accepted, I don't know for sure. It was one of two possibilities: either the ammunition or the treatment.
He could have wrapped this up years ago by submitting the heads of the shot deer for analysis by board certified veterinarians.
Every time I have made that suggestion he has come up with excuses...each one more ridiculous than the last.
First he said that he couldn't exclude head injuries on these deer from when they fell to the ground after being shot. I suggested a soft bait station but he said he isn't allowed to bait these. When asked about the veterinarian's input (or lack thereof) he claims financial limitations. He shies completely away from any kind of medical input whether it is expertise with animals or humans.
This is a guy with a PhD, doing a prospective research project. I recently completed a Master of Science degree in Health informatics and my final project was an expert system to do with the detection and enumeration of projectile fragments in humans from GSWs.
With these projects you have a proposal, a supervisor or advisor and a clear outline of what you are trying to do and what the acceptable measures of the outcomes will be. Even if he doesn't have to confirm to a university's work plan approval, his academic pedigree (which on paper is certainly higher than mine) should imbue his project with an element of academic integrity which needs an honest unbiased approach to the subject matter.
You don't on one hand claim that you cannot do the required testing on the deer because you will be hounded by PETA and then on the other hand announce that you have placed raccoons in buckets and fired into the water, resulting in the delayed death of at least one of those animals (again with no analysis by the required specialists to exclude pulmonary oedema or drowning as a cause of death).
I told him many moons back that I would accept his theory if he could show me one pair of deer that had been analysed post shooting (one by arrow, one by bullet), and there was definite evidence confirmed by an unbiased appropriate expert that the deer killed by bullet had neurological flags that the other one didn't. How hard is that to do, and is it really financially or academically taxing compared to the sum of all of his other efforts over the years related to this theory?
It wouldn't suit him to do it, because then his theory would be solidly rejected and he would get no foot in the door for whatever pay-off or commercial venture he envisages this BPW may unlock.
When I did my project, I provided a basic outline of what I was doing and also access to the associated online logic system I developed so that radiologists, trauma surgeons, AFTE, military and LEO persons could give me feedback and criticism on it. I used a database of 150 GSW patients where I had collected photographs of wounds, clothing, medical imaging and also operative and clinical notes and even photographs of recovered projectiles to do my study. I also had background statistics for the entire research period which encompassed an available sample of 542 patients. I collected this single-handeledly on site at a trauma unit in South Africa, with no funding and at the time with nothing more than a Diploma to my name.
Imagine how disappointed I was when I couldn't get the system to consistently match projectiles and trajectories in circumstances where a person may have more than three skin breaches.
Instead of trying to peddle this system (I have had a lot of interest in this work) I have had to back off because I can see that this isn't going to work. I may have to try something different, such as doing another project where I can get ethical clearance to change the way in which routine X-ray imaging is done for a prospective sample of GSW patients.
That is the correct thing to do.
Disparate references, meandering around available resources which could prove or refute his theory in short order, and dare I say it a certain lack of academic integrity and ethics on the part of Courtney have led me to take an adversarial stance against him.
Whilst I have seen traumatic effects one or two inches from a bullet's terminal trajectory in real patients in a variety of tissues, there is nothing in the totality of the evidence available to support Courtney's BPW theory and I for one don't buy it.
He published it in a journal, yes, but that doesn't mean it is sound. You can check the articles by Wakefield and the MMR scandal here in the UK if you want an example of less than forthright academic publishing.