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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42470 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Haven't seen any update yet, but given the political situation they'll probably keep coding him for a long time before giving up and declaring him dead, but from a practical perspective he was dead with the shot (in the sense that repairing the damage would be nearly impossible).

His vascular structures looked torched from the video, supposedly it was a rifle round.

I have no idea how fast the response was/how close he was to a trauma center though, if the wagon had a shit ton of blood and they had advanced trauma options available it's maybe possible he makes it with severe deficits, but that's the kind of wound I wouldn't want to treat if the person was shot in the theater with Anesthesia and like fucking ECMO already standing by.

It didn't matter but there's a Level 1, 45 miles (by ground ambulance on freeway) North in Salt Lake City.

Yeah later finding out that the closest hospital was a level 2.... + looking again it looks like he may have been internally decapitated by the shot.

That was my paramedic friend's immediately assessment as well.

Yeah, that’s a wound a deer wouldn’t have run from- he was dead before he hit the ground.

The number of things we can turn from dead to not dead is shocking but this was unlikely to be one of them.

I wander how many units (of blood) they used on him.

I hope they gave it a try.

Fun excerpt from GURPS Martial Arts:

On any neck hit with a cutting, impaling, piercing, or tight-beam burning attack, roll 1d. On a 1, it hits a vein/artery.

A fighter with a cutting, impaling, piercing, or tight-beam burning weapon can target a major blood vessel in the neck (jugular vein or carotid artery), arm (brachial artery), or leg (femoral artery). The attack has an extra −3: −5 for a limb, −8 for the neck. The sudden blood loss increases the wounding modifier for that hit location by 0.5; e. g., a cutting attack gets ×2 instead of ×1.5 against a limb, or ×2.5 instead of ×2 for the neck. Since the intent is to start bleeding—not to destroy bone and muscle—ignore crippling effects and damage limits for limbs. Realistically, such injuries can cause almost instant unconsciousness, with death coming in seconds. The GM may rule that Mortal Wounds doesn’t apply and that any failed HT roll to avoid death means the victim collapses and bleeds out messily. This is a “special effect” of dying from a vein or artery hit. A miss by 1 hits the neck, arm, or leg, as appropriate.

His vascular structures looked torched from the video, supposedly it was a rifle round.

Police say the shot came from a building 200 yards away, which certainly indicates a rifle.

The injury looked like it caused significant damage to surrounding structures- so you have general exsanguination issues, and the clock on cerebral perfusion but the bigger problem is that repairing the anatomy would be a nightmare, some approximation of tourniqueting a neck wound is already a sign you've hit catastrophe but something this big and scrambled? Unlikely.

Even if everything goes right somehow he's probably had too much down time for any neurological recovery.

It's grim.

Right, idk how you keep a brain alive even with transfusions if the pipe leading to the brain is missing.

Keeping him alive at all would be astonishing but even then it's hard to imagine that he'll ever truly recover.

It's not impossible- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Malarchuk#Neck_injury

But huge difference in the type of damage from a skate and a rifle round.

We have shocking ability to help with blood loss and at this point most hospitals have updated their mass transfusion protocol and all that but again a rifle round has a lot of energy (and may have also shattered his spine).

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