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This whole thing, the NYT and your tongue bath of it, bespeaks nothing so much as two people who have never seen terminal ballistics talking ridiculous.
Now why would that be? What percentage of surface area of the body is the head and torso, and how does the movement of the limbs affect their statistical chance of catching stray rounds? What's the effect of people poking their heads out to see what's happening? Is this calculation well established in the military literature? Because I've never heard of it.
And how exactly does one calculate that someone had been shot only once in the head? A rifle round through the skull will tend to pop the whole thing open like a smashed pumpkin. Could have been shot once, could have been shot fifty times. Could have not been a bullet at all, but a rock or chunk of shrapnel from an explosion. Good luck telling the difference.
This is the sort of thing that NYT journalists find impressive, the fact that you do as well speaks more to you than to anything going on in any war anywhere.
I guarantee this has been well-studied somewhere, if only by the police. There’s a lot of papers on determining homicide vs. suicide via location and angle. That implies some sort of literature on homicide pathology. My searches weren’t very fruitful, though.
I don't think they'd help much for children in a war zone. Even most areas of Chicago aren't located near active war zones where stray rifle bullets might come from.
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The cases in which the child’s head is fully destroyed are not even presented to medical examiners, according to the lead author’s tweet linked in my sub-commented update. This means that the doctors are presented with all gunshot wounds precluding those gunshot wounds which have so destroyed the head that medical intervention is obviously impossible.
Per the same update, the NYT presented the photographs and C-Scan images to a number of medical professionals. “multiple, independent experts in gunshot wounds, radiology and pediatric trauma, who attested to the images’ credibility”. I trust that more than you, or “random Twitter user with Ukrainian flag in username claiming to be ballistics expert”.
We know from shootings in America that stray bullets or inaccurate shots don’t magnetize especially to the head and chest. The lead author previously worked in Flint and Haiti, and he found the proportion of these wounds to be unusual. And, noting the above, the actual proportion of headshots is higher, as the doctors didn’t see the head implosion cases.
Should the IDF be shooting children who peak out their head in a highly dense urban environment?
Let’s assume it is not well-established in the military literature because it has not been researched. Does this mean we turn off all reasoning and thinking until the military studies it? No. We make the best extrapolation from the best available evidence. If the IDF is shooting a terrorist and a bullet inadvertently pierces a child, the likelihood that it lands as a headshot is low, both due to the surface area of the head and the fact that two humans can’t stand in the same spot at the same time.
The Shakespearean language really helps your argument.
With all that said, we can indeed consult some available literature on the site of injury %s in military injuries and stray bullet injuries. 6% and 16.1% of stray bullets wound the head and chest respectively in the context of insurgent military activity (Libyan civil war).
Insert something about availability bias here.
There's a story (possibly approcriphal) about how the british army back in the late 1800s thought that helmets might be somehow dangerous because units where the new steel pot helmets were issued tended to report significantly more head injuries than those that were still wearing berets or the soft cork "pith" helmets.
Subsequent analysis concluded that while reported head injuries had gone up significantly, overall casualties had either remained constant or been reduced, and the reason for the increase in reports was that soldiers who might have otherwise been killed/incapacitated were instead surviving to complain about thier injuries.
Theres a similar story floating around about bombers in WW2 where the Army Air Corps, wanting to increase aircraft survivability, started collecting data on where aircraft had been hit by machine gun fire with the intent of adding additional armor to the most commonly hit areas only for some bright spark to propose the opposite. A hot spot on the heat map indicated that a plane could be hit there and still make it home 9 times out of 10, it was actually the cold spots that needed the extra protection.
People shot in the gut or an extremity these days generally don't die so long as they recieve prompt medical care (bleeding and infection being the chief risk in such cases) so of course the majority of fatal shootings are going to be concentrated in the head or chest area.
Edit: There's also the issue of training and equipment, i would expect an IDF infantry man/woman to be substantially better equipped (Tavor w/ high-end red-dot vs rickety AK) and to be a better shot overall than your average Jihadi even in the absence such material advantages.
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