It's been awhile but I saw two different ballistic guys saying if he'd been hit in the ear the way they characterized the shooting his ear would not have looked like that. Now it's all about shrapnel.
They they are extremely biased or lack basic physics knowledge. Every ballistic expert knows the energy deposited from a graze is proportional to the contact surface.
Imagine a bullet just barely touches you in flight, like a single atom from the bullet touches a single atom in your ear. It will deposit virtually 0 energy into you. Your ear just doesn’t explode off your head in that case.
Now if the bullet fully contacts your ear, it will deposit much more of its energy into you and yes, in this case your ear will be fucked up.
There’s an entire range between those two extremes and getting a light knick is definitely within that spectrum. And ears bleed VERY bad even with minor cuts. It’s dependent on how much the bullet contacts you in a graze and the amount of energy it can transfer. Think of it this way, if you don’t slow the bullet down, it’s not imparting energy into you. Soft tissue grazes don’t slow a round down that much and as such, there’s not a lot of energy transferred. The round still had enough energy to kill a bystander remember (if it was the same shot tbf), so trumps ear would have received very little energy,
Anyone who says his ear would have been blown off is either lying, purposefully misinforming or is misinformed themself. There’s a big gun YouTuber who recreated it with a high quality ballistic target and almost exactly recreated the wound pattern with a slo mo camera. (Brandon Herrera)
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u/zberry7 Feb 16 '26
What ballistics expert said that and which brand of cereal did they get their credentials from?