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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28220 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Ah, yes, the children shot in the head point-blank range with assault rifles, where the bullet remained IN the skull, yet whose head was pretty much intact. Obvious Hamas propaganda. These children (if indeed they are children) were either hit by nearly-spent bullets (e.g. at long range, or fired in the air) or the bullet was simply placed under them when the X-ray was taken.

If you shoot someone in the head at close range with an assault rifle, the bullet goes through and leaves an enormous exit wound, plus a wide path of damage through the brain due to hydrostatic shock.

If they use some underpowered subsonic assassin setup, then it's possible it could be slow enough to just make a hole an embed in the skull at close range. Most of the bullets in the images look like 5.56 (?), and it's really not the tool for the job. It'd likely not work reliably in the IDF issued rifles (are they mostly using Tavor's still?) as this kind of ammo usually requires a special setup or tinkering beyond what infantryman has in the field.

If there's death squads going around giving Moscow neckties to Palestinian children, then they would probably choose something else. Mossad used to like those nifty .22's. They also probably wouldn't let the kids they just shot in the head get carted off to the hospital. On the other hand, if a child catches a strays, ricochet, or misidentification there's less reason to prevent them from going to the hospital.

Soldiers blasting kid's skulls for fun with their issued rifles on a regular basis seems unlikely given the details in the article if only for the fact there are so many kids going to the hospital after getting blasted in the skull with a rifle cartridge. "44 doctors, nurses and paramedics saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza" with a couple X-ray's doesn't sell me on death squad or even misconduct. It shows me kids have been shot in the head according to some doctors.

The lethal combination of what Human Rights Watch describes as indiscriminate military violence, what Oxfam calls the deliberate restriction of food and humanitarian aid, near-universal displacement of the population, and destruction of the health care system is having the calamitous effect that many Holocaust and genocide scholars warned of nearly a year ago.

I think this paragraph tells me enough about the journalist's sympathies and where her biases lay. Doesn't mean the IDF hasn't had misconduct or committed war crimes. I suspect they have just based on what I've seen make it online. Especially in the early months of the war. But, probably not to the degree, frequency, or relevancy (genocide) that this writer believes.

are they mostly using Tavor's still?

No, most units moved back to M4’s, or an m-16 variant for rear units. You may see an Arad at places, and IIRC the border guard is trying out M7s. I haven’t seen a full-size Tavor in a while. Some reserve units still used micro-Tavors (X95) which is my personal favorite.

If you shoot someone in the head at close r

Amen. No damn way a 7.62x51 rifle round (what the Israeli's use, comparable to a .308 Winchester) fails to exit a human skull.

The Israelis use 5.56 NATO, mostly. Hamas uses 7.62. There's not enough information in the X-rays to distinguish (because they don't tell you the size of the head), though I think some (including the one I linked) probably are bigger than 5.56 -- I suspect that one was a round from an AK-47 or similar either at long range or (more likely) fired not quite straight up.

The 7.62x39 round used in an AK is different than the 7.62x51 NATO. Or the Mosin’s 7.62x54R, for that matter. They’ve all got the same bullet diameter, but different bullet lengths/weights and cases.

Maybe @NelsonRushton was thinking of the IMI Galil, which had a 7.62x51 version. But as you noted, Israel used and uses 5.56x45 for its infantrymen.

He also could have been referring to rifles like the SR-25 or M24. Those would fit the “sniper” narrative. But news outlets can’t decide if the Israelis are shooting children crossing the street, or executing them point blank, so who knows?

I did a hasty google search and I was just mistaken. It appears that the IDF uses a 5.56x45mm NATO. Still, that round will go in one shoulder of a 200-pound wild boar and out the left shoulder, leaving a golf ball sized exit wound. In Marshall & Sanow's study of terminal ballistics, they give penetration averages for pistol rounds in real world shootings (of humans), but for the 5.56 NATO they simply say "routinely exits the human body".

So while I was mistaken about the caliber of the round, I stand by the claim that it is not plausible for an IDF rifle round to stop inside a human skull.

Doesn't really matter, though. Any of those rounds fired from point blank range or really any range at which you can see the target without optics, or indeed any reasonable sniper range even with optics, is going to do a lot more damage to the head than shown in those X-rays. Nobody's sniping children from a mile away.

I concur. I think that photo, at least, is obviously fake.

Ed: or the bullet only killed a child after expending its energy in four or five Hamas bodies. That could also explain how they were so close to a hospital!

they use 7.62 NATO for snipers and machine guns, IIRC, and .50 for HMGs. that bullet looks like a .50.

A 7.62x51 or .50 BMG at close range doing that little damage is even LESS likely than a 7.62x39 or 5.56 NATO doing it, of course. But if I'm doing my measuring correctly, if that bullet is a .50BMG with 13mm diameter, the head has a front-to-back size of 266mm, which is too big (99th percentile for men is is 217mm) If it's 7.8mm (7.62mm nominal), it's 159mm; too small for an adult, and we don't know the age of the victim. But of course this is an X-ray and sizes can be distorted.

your measurement definitely beats my eyeballing. and yeah, I'd be mystified at how either one could end up in that position in a kid's head, on purpose. Like, you need the bullet to have lost 80-90% of its velocity before it's going to stop like that, so we're probably talking high-angle fire at long ranges.

Could be an old CT scan from a casualty of one of those Arab weddings where they fire guns in the air indiscriminately.

You're assuming that's a 7.62x51 projectile. It looks like a .50 BMG to me, given the relative scale to the head, unless that's a newborn.

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