Because it’s difficult to pack enough explosive powder into a cartridge that’s supposed to fit within the shooter’s pistol grip, handgun designers typically try to increase firepower by sticking a bigger piece of metal on the end of a round. The difference can be seen with pistol rounds, as well. In the technical language of ballistics engineers, the standard unit of measurement for a bullet’s mass is grains of metal, and depending on the manufacturer, a. That’s because the 7.62 is almost twice as massive as a. 223 at that distance, the AK’s bullet can deliver 370 foot-pounds of force, more than the AR. Tests show that while it travels at 1,154 feet per second at 500 yards, slower than the. 223, the round fired by the AR-15 (America’s most popular semiautomatic rifle), but it hits its target with more energy. It was modified to accept a detachable magazine and equipped with a folding stock. While typical SKS rifles do not qualify as assault weapons because they have a fixed magazine and stock and lack a pistol grip, Hodgkinson’s gun would have met the criteria. In a statement, the FBI said he used a modified an SKS, the predecessor to the AK-47 which shoots the same bullets. MassĪccording to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hodgkinson was armed with a rifle that shot 7.62 caliber bullets. The larger a projectile’s surface area, the greater its ability to transfer its energy to the target, instead of simply penetrating straight through. The energy delivered to the target increases geometrically along with increases in mass, and exponentially with increases in velocity. The amount of energy a bullet radiates into a target is determined by a simple formula taught in high school: It’s the product of one half the projectile’s mass times the square of the velocity. Projectile weapons work by transferring kinetic energy to a target, which ripples out as a shockwave through tissue as the bullet plows through the body, leaving a cavity in its wake. Some basic physics explains why the choice of weapon, or more precisely, the choice of bullet, enabled the suspect, James Hodgkinson, who was killed by law enforcement officers, to wreak so much havoc. The gunman was able to inflict such extensive damage from across a baseball field because he was using a semiautomatic rifle that may have qualified as an assault weapon, akin to a standard infantry combat weapon. Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana whose condition has been upgraded to “serious,” suffered broken bones, ruptured blood vessels, and shredded internal organs. That meant that the tip didn’t just bore straight through him, but rather that the whole length of the projectile rotated over and over through Scalise’s body, ripping a wider hole and distributing a bigger shock wave throughout his bones and tissue.

The rifle round, which is longer than a pistol projectile, likely also began tumbling after its point collided with his hip. The projectile, a 7.62 x 39 bullet, hit the House majority whip with between 370 and 1,550 foot-pounds of force. Representative Steve Scalise last week was traveling at somewhere between 1,100 and 2,600 feet per second.

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