cookekdjr,
I think it's not possible to be that generous to him. He's
very specific about the autopsies per day number. He doesn't just say 8 a day, he says "
an average of 8.2 autopsies per day/365 days per year". That is far too specific for him to simply be mistaken. And with the publicity the thread got, it's hard to believe that he wouldn't have corrected his precise "error" at some point. Furthermore, someone called him on the numbers on the thread and he replied without correcting the original figure and said that the previous day he had worked 7 autopsies. I think he's sticking by his numbers even if you're not.
I said more than 2,000, but if you use his VERY specific numbers, it works out to 2993. Almost half the deaths for the entire county and approaching 3 times the number of autopsies one would expect to be taking place period.
You say that maybe he's getting autopsies from out of the county (which he confirms--not surprisingly since he's going to have to find a LOT of bodies to hit the 3000 mark).
Deaths in the entire state of
GA in 2003 were 66,478. If you assume that 20% of them resulted in autopsies, that's 13,296 autopsies for the entire state. This guy is effectively claiming to have witnessed a quarter (22.5%) of the autopsies for the entire state of GA. I just can't see it...
Later on in the thread he says that he had "
only 4 autopsies" in one day that were gunshot deaths. If you assume that's a pretty normal day (and he says that it's a rare day when they "
don't see at least a couple of gunshot wounds" so we're definitely in the neighborhood), that comes out to his morgue(s?) working about 5% of the gunshot deaths in the entire nation. Again, that seems pretty high.
Furthermore, according to this
link there are a total of 887 autopsies done in all of in Fulton County in 2005. Far lower than his projected number. Even if you assume that he's being very general in his use of the term "autopsy", there were still only 1427 bodies examined in 2005 by the medical examiner. Less than half of the 2,993 autopsies he witnesses in a year. Ok, maybe he's not with the FCME. Then why doesn't he say so? He replied in the post IMMEDIATELY following the post with the link to the FCME stats and totally ignores a very strong challenge to his credibility. Why?
He finally gets around to disavowing being with the FCME on page 20 of the thread. So, he's not with the FCME and yet he's STILL seeing 2993 autopsies a year. WHERE are all these bodies coming from???
There are other inconsistencies. 10ring points out several on the first post of page 13.
Here are some more. He starts out praising the .357Magnum as a "
glorious stopper" and then finally gets around to saying that they almost never see it and when they do see one "
or any revolver round, for that matter) at autopsy is with a suicide". So, what's he saying? That if you shoot yourself in the temple with a .357Mag, it's a glorious stopper? Not really. It gets clearer later on.
His comments about ballistics gel are silly. Sure, ballistics gel isn't flesh, but all of modern science hasn't come up with something that's a better approximation. Maybe it's not perfect, but within the assumptions made, it's pretty good. More on this later.
He says repeatedly that big and slow-moving is the best but also says repeatedly that the velocity of the .357Mag makes up for it's smaller size. We get a clue on page 5 when it becomes pretty obvious from some of his posts that he's just repeating what he's heard about .357Mag since he keeps talking about its "reputation", saying it's "known as a manstopper." Sooo. It now seems that his comments about the "marvelous" abilities of the .357Mag are primarily hearsay. To make it worse, in one of his posts he admits that "wound damage is determined by the kinetic energy lost in the tissue" and says "
It sounds like we want a big bullet moving at high velocity" and yet still sticks to his big and slow recommendation--definitely not a recipe for kinetic energy. Again, more on that later...
This comment "
The temporary cavity is extremely important in that it is largely responsible for producing injuries to arteries, veins, organs, and nerves that are not directly struck by the bullet or its fragments." is directly contradictory to everything I've ever seen in that arteries and veins are definitely elastic tissue which is universally accepted to be virtually impervious to temporary cavity effects. And he doesn't just say it once either. More to come...
There are also his clear statements that there is a big difference between the effects of bullets from different handgun calibers. Yet we have seen on THR at least one doctor claiming that the effects are very similar and that they can't tell one caliber from another by looking at the wounds. Yep, you guessed it, this mystery is solved too--later in the thread.
So, let's wrap up some of the more later comments I made earlier. Here's a good starting place! "I
mainly get the skeletal remains and the ones that are so decomposed that the ME can't do much with them." FINALLY something that starts to make sense--so he's comparing skeletal remains and badly decomposed bodies to ballistics gel? He's determining wound paths and temporary cavity damage from bodies that "
the ME can't do much with"? Now the picture is getting clearer.
Here's what I think. I think he's probably working in some sort of capacity in a morgue. I think he works mostly with the badly decomposed bodies--the ones no one else can do anything with. I think he probably sees a lot of dead bodies and a good number dead from gunshots. I think he also sees exactly what he wants to in terms of caliber effectiveness and rationalizes it with what he has heard and read from other places. Here's one telling bit of evidence to support what I think. He says: "
I've NEVER failed to see a .40 or .45 get the job done..."
That is a truly INCREDIBLE statement. A man who claims to see 3000 autopsies a year and yet has NEVER seen a .40 or .45 fail to work?? Oh... but
he only sees DEAD people. Naturally he's never seen a .40 or .45 fail to work.
Then what does he mean by this--the rest of the sentence? "...I can't say the same about the 9mm." You can't have it both ways unless you're only seeing what you want to. BTW, he later clarifies that "
I don't think I've ever seen a .45 fail to penetrate adequately..." a statement that is a good deal shakier than his "NEVER" affirmation.
Ok, we still left some loose ends.
He FINALLY makes it clear that he's not picking a round based on EFFECTIVENESS but based on "
PENETRATION. Pure and simple." In other words, he's basing his conclusions purely on how well rounds penetrate. Something that you don't have to work in a morgue to find out. But he's using his position in the morgue as if that somehow adds special validation to his preconceived notions of what makes handgun calibers effective. That really tears it in my mind. (And it also explains why he sticks to his .45caliber guns in the face of his earlier statements seemingly affirming the .357Mag and rounds with similar ballistics/energy.)
And what about those statements that contradict established medical fact? We finally get let in on the knowledge that he's an anthropologist, not a medical professional. No wonder some of his statements don't match those of medical experts. Kinda makes you wish he'd revealed that little nugget earlier than PAGE 15 of the thread.
If you put all his posts together and read between the lines, the story just isn't the same as the one he's trying to sell. I think he's probably being pretty honest about things by the end of the thread, but he certainly started out giving the strong impression that he was a medical professional doing in depth analysis on shooting victims. Only after a good bit of discussion do we learn that he OBSERVES autopsies, has no medical credentials and that his conclusions are based solely on what he has
seen (not measured or analyzed) of how various handgun calibers
penetrate.
That's cool. Lots of people put their eggs in the penetration basket. But face it--that thread went on for 20 pages because this guy made himself sound like something he wasn't--not because of the underlying topic.
If he had just posted that the .45ACP penetrates better than the 9mm and that's why he likes it, it would have been a single page thread. Unfortunately when you finally get through all the smokescreen, that's what this 20 pager finally boils down to: One man's OPINION of what makes a bullet effective and his OPINION of which bullets penetrate best.
Here's the short way to figure out what's going on. Read the first page of the thread. Then read the post by DeadMeat2 on page 19. It's not at all hard to see the difference. Page one, this guy is an expert letting us in on some inside information. Page 19, we finally get the confession that this is his opinion "enhanced" by some anecdotes from his unusual occupation.
panga in hand charged a police officer armed with a pump action shotgun
.
, at the very last moment another officer took out his 9mm and shot the charging man right between the eyes
,he dropped like a stone afterwards they had a look at the corpse and found that his backbone could be seen from the front as the shotgun shot out all his guts 
. i think luck has a lot to do with every gunfight no matter what gun you carry. sure practice is important but luck is critical
