What Would You Rather?

Would you rather get shot from 50 feet or 500 feet?

Intuition says 500 feet, right? Well, mine does anyway. Knowing nothing about weaponry or the physics of bullet travel, my intu-wishin’ wants to believe that it would likely hurt less and do less damage when getting shot from a much further distance. 

But then I learned about tumbling bullets while reading Touching the Dragon by James Hatch. I always thought bullets glide down like an airplane (maybe some do?), but no —  they tumble. And they do a lot more damage than those that don’t.

James Hatch, a former SEAL Team VI, member got shot in the femur from about 50 feet away by an AK-47. The bullet went clean through Hatch’s leg.

During rehabilitation, his doctor asked, “You got shot from close range didn’t you?” Hatch asked why he thought that. The doctor replied, “Because you still have your leg. If you had gotten shot from a further distance, you wouldn’t have a leg.” 

Straight bullets = narrow wound channel. Tumbling bullet = wide channel.

This got me thinking about how I come to know things. That I cannot always trust my common sense or intuition. 

Today, we’re presented with snippets and sound-bytes of information on a wide array of topics. Presented in a confident manner, we think we’re learning something. Maybe. But maybe we’re being tricked by the presentation. 

This is where it can get dangerous. This is how we think we know something that just isn’t so.

I believe real learning happens slowly and from exhaustive digging and simply sitting with the information for a while. We need time to gather and then piece it together. This cannot happen scrolling through media on our phones or TV. 

I wonder how many other things that I think I know that just aren’t true. Probably a lot.