"The Trace: Does it matter what kind of gun a victim is shot with? David H. Newman: It matters a great deal. If it’s a small caliber gun, the wounds are visibly smaller. If it’s a shotgun wound, it’s more visually striking. I’ve seen children who have been shot with a shotgun. I remember this one boy, I think he was eight, he and a friend were playing with a shotgun, and his friend shot him in the face. When he came in, he was still very much alive, but he was in terrible pain and didn’t really have any facial features. But the worst is a wound from an AR-15 or AK-47 — high-muzzle velocity weapons, which impart a tremendous amount of kinetic energy into the body. Those are much more destructive. You’re looking at a wound that, externally, is two, three, four times bigger than any handgun wound. And that is reflective of the damage that happens on the inside. When a bullet from a high-muzzle velocity weapon hits the intestines, it’s like an explosion, whereas a low-muzzle velocity can be very similar to a knife going through the intestines; there’s bleeding, but it doesn’t destroy the whole area. A high-muzzle bullet, however, destroys whole areas of body. With a bone that’s been shot with a standard-issue caliber handgun, you’ll see a break, a hole in the bone, and maybe some displacement. But a high-muzzle weapon shatters that bone into hundreds of microscopic pieces, in a way that cannot be repaired. You need to essentially clean out the bone that has been struck and remove it from the body; it’s now a worthless tissue. You can’t believe that a bullet could do this amount of damage."