Setting: Present-day, a healthy man in his mid-thirties is running and hit from behind by ammo from a shotgun. The wound is in the left side area
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This isn't really my area of expertise. Hopefully someone else will have more and better data for you. But this may help you with your search terms in the meantime.
Thank you! That was an interesting read. I have no idea exactly what was loaded in the shooter's gun; they didn't get that specific. But that article is something I will keep in mind.
It can depend where you're hit, too - tiny pellets hitting the neck or face are potentially much more dangerous than tiny pellets hitting a big muscle. So someone shot in the side at long range will probably be okay; someone shot in the face at long range might lose an eye.
I've always been told, generally speaking, that the farther away a shotgun is, the less bad the wound. This is in part because no matter your type of ammo, the pellets spread out the farther away they go, and so not as many of them hit, without as much force, and so less damage is done. There should be pictures somewhere of target shots... I'll look it up later. But this is a major contributing factor as to why distance shot gun wounds are generally much less severe than up close, when the closer distance tends to, well, shred a little more efficiently.
If the shotgun is loaded with a shotgun slug rather than with shot, it will have a lot more range and will be able to do a lot more damage at a distance than a shotgun loaded with shot.
Due to LJ's comment character length restriictions, this is 1 of 2. Former paramedic here. I have seen shotgun wounds at various distances. First some mechanics: how much damage an object does, when fired from a given firearm, depends on how fast it's propelled, its mass (basically, how much it weighs and how dense it is), and how far it has to go before hitting the target. Single objects (e.g. a bullet, or "slug") will retain their speed longer because the slow-down caused by the friction of air is proportional to the total surface area--and they have less surface area. Multiple objects (like the "shot" in a typical shotgun shell) slow down faster because there's more surface area (for friction to affect) per unit of mass
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Thank you so much! That is very informative. It sounds like the wound probably could be as serious as portrayed in the episode. I'll have to think some more about how to handle it in detail if I want to get more in-depth about it than I have in the past three years.
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One of the things that will make a difference is what type of shell is being fired. Here's a quick comparison of buckshot and birdshot:
http://www.wcti12.com/news/buckshot-vs-birdshot-which-does-more-damage/20713508
One would be more likely to give you the superficial injuries (bird) and the other would be more likely to give you serious injuries (buck).
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I've always been told, generally speaking, that the farther away a shotgun is, the less bad the wound. This is in part because no matter your type of ammo, the pellets spread out the farther away they go, and so not as many of them hit, without as much force, and so less damage is done. There should be pictures somewhere of target shots... I'll look it up later. But this is a major contributing factor as to why distance shot gun wounds are generally much less severe than up close, when the closer distance tends to, well, shred a little more efficiently.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_slug#Guns_for_use_with_slugs
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