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Notes -
I've experienced kind of a similar thing on a completely different subject.
One of my other interests is firearms and self-defense. On every controversial shooting incident where somebody gets killed, somebody always chimes in with something to the effect of, they should have shot them in the leg instead. I've used to respond with the conventional gun culture version of the argument against that, which is that it's wrong to think of a firearm as a non-lethal weapon, if you're ever justified at shooting at somebody you should be shooting center mass to stop the threat, and also that virtually nobody is accurate enough in an actual life-threatening situation to reliably hit somebody's leg. These arguments mostly don't seem to have much effect on people though. I started trying another argument, which is that leg shots are not at all less lethal - the thigh has some of the biggest arteries in the body, feeding the biggest muscles in the body and attached to the thickest bones in the body, and sending bullets into that is likely to cause severe enough bleeding to lead to death in minutes, if not life-changing injuries that they will never fully recover from. That argument seems to be much more effective at convincing people that attempting to shoot people who are a deadly danger in the leg or other extremity is not a good idea.
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