bosco, frankly I'm less interested in yours or the ER doc's observations than I am in the coroner's.
And how can you possibly say that "at close range a .22 is hard to beat if you want to drop someone like a brick."? How can you say that any other bullet will be less effective, be less likely to penetrate, more likely to act unpredictably, and less likely to case significant cavity trauma than a .22?
Observations about how many people are hit and killed with .22s say more about how many there are than how effective they are. From your own description, these deaths from .22s sound more like hits on unsuspecting victims. Like the cows mentioned above, they usually have the common courtesy to stand there and let you shoot them, and aren't trying to shoot you back.
When I was 16, me and a few friends were out in the desert with our .22s, shooting anything that moved. (Along with plenty of things that didn't.) We don't know who fired the shot. (We agreed that it wasn't me, I was reloading with the action open at the time,) but my buddy looked down and had a hole right below his right rib section. And an exit wound in the rear, just to the right of the spine. We said a very naughty word, and carried him about a mile back to the truck, and drove as fast as we could to the hospital. He walked out of the ER 20 minutes later with three stiches and a band aid. The bullet entered the front at a shallow angle, skimmed the outside of the skin, did a u-turn, and exited on the other side. It hit nothing but skin tissue. (I now know that the color and amount of blood should have told me the wound was not as serious as I thought it was. But it's still cool to report to basic training and tell the guy giving the first aid class that I have in fact treated a gunshot wound.)
This is one story, from one guy, in one situation. But the fact is, bullets with lower mass do unpredictable things. If my friend had been hit with pretty much ANYTHING besides a .22, would he have made it back to the truck? Would he have lost a lot of blood? One thing I'm pretty certain of, he wouldn't have walked out 20 minutes later with a few stitches.