The date is March 6, 1978, and one of America’s most liked and despised men has just had lunch
with his attorney and is heading back to the courthouse in Gwinnett County, Georgia,
to attend one of his many famous trials. Bullets suddenly ring out and both men drop
to the ground after being hit. What they don’t know is that a man who would later be dubbed
“The Racist Killer” is making his getaway. One of the victims of this crime will have some scars,
but the other will never walk again and live through periods of agonizing pain.
That’s how it goes with bullets. Sometimes they cause little damage,
and sometimes they ruin a person forever. But before we get into the technical details
about being shot, we guess you want to know who this man was who was both
admired and utterly despised. His name was Larry Flynt.
We say was, because he died early in 2021.
Back in the day when this intrepid entrepreneur was shocking the US with
his pornographic magazine Hustler, he wasn’t exactly popular with a good part of the country.
These folks didn’t want what they called smut damaging the minds and eyes of the youth,
after seeing that Flynt had turned a small naughty newsletter into a national sensation.
As his magazines were selling in the millions, he ended up in court fighting his First Amendment
rights while using some very colorful language. Then one day a madman and serial killer named
Joseph Paul Franklin found one of Flynt’s magazines.
This guy’s racism was the reason he killed perhaps over 20 people,
and it’s also why he shot Flynt and his attorney – something he wasn’t charged with in the end,
although he went down for the other murders. Many years after the shooting he admitted
he did it because he’d seen an interracial couple making out in one of the magazines,
something he couldn’t accept. Yep, Franklin was a big fan of Adolf Hitler’s ideology. He later
said this about what he saw in the magazine, “It just made me sick...I threw the magazine
down and thought, I'm gonna kill that guy.” He picked up his Ruger .44 caliber semi-automatic
rifle and went in search of the porn king. Franklin was executed for his crimes in 2013,
at which point, Mr. Flynt was still getting around in a wheelchair.
Flynt’s attorney, Gene Reeves Jr., was also seriously wounded but after spending one month
in hospital he was good to go. That’s because when his body was penetrated by cold hard steel,
by the whim of fate, he wasn’t hit in such a way to cause lifelong injuries.
As for Flynt’s injuries, it was revealed that the bullet had caused severe spinal cord damage.
The New York Times at the time wrote in the first paragraph of a story that the chief neurosurgeon,
Dr. George Tindall, who removed the bullet from Flynt’s back,
said he had a 50-50 chance of ever walking again.
He told the press, “There are no reflexes in the lower extremities
and there is a loss of sensation from his mid‐thighs down.” Things were bad, very bad.
Flynt would not walk again, and with him being notorious for his love of sex,
he wasn’t exactly over the moon about losing the ability to use his member. This was later
rectified with the use of a penile implant. Still, that hardly put a silver lining on
the darkest of clouds that followed Flynt around for the rest of his life.
That bullet had hit him in the spinal canal at a spot called the third lumbar vertebra. Back then,
when such a thing happened there was only a 50 percent chance that the damaged part would
regenerate. Even now if a bullet hits you down there, you might not ever walk again.
At the time, the surgeon also said that there had been damage to the nerves at the end of
the spinal column. That surgeon didn’t know then that these nerve injuries would plague
Flynt for much of the rest of his life. Flynt lived most of his life in almost
constant pain, although many years later some of the nerves that were causing the anguish
were removed. But before this, when he felt pain on an almost daily basis, it was so much that he
ended up getting addicted to painkillers and booze. He later said that he didn’t
want Franklin executed, but oh God, he wished that man couldn’t experience the pain he had.
We think this line of Flynt’s about sums up how he felt:
“I would love an hour in a room with him and a pair of wire-cutters and pliers,
so I could inflict the same damage on him that he inflicted on me.”
So, we have constant debilitating pain. We have a man that could never walk again and only with the
help of modern science was able to use his most treasured asset. Could things have been any worse?
The answer is yes. Because of all the drugs Flynt was taking for the pain,
he ended up having an overdose which brought on a stroke. After that, he had difficulty
speaking. We’re sure all the good Christians who hated him, while not very Buddhist, said this was
a fitting kind of karma for releasing smut on America and talking filth at every opportunity.
Flynt was 78 when he died of heart failure. So, as being shot goes and living to tell
the tale, getting whacked where Flynt did in the back is about as bad as it gets.
Or is it? Before we get to worse than that, let’s first look
at some numbers, just to give you an idea of how many people get shot just in the USA.
The Washington Post wrote in 2021 that even though the pandemic kept a lot of people off
the streets in 2020, that year saw the worst rise in gun-related violence for a long time.
Meanwhile, the CDC wrote that the increase in all homicides from 2019 to 2020 was the
highest increase (30%) since 1905. Pew Research cited some FBI data that
said there were 21,570 homicides in 2020, up from 16,669 in 2019. The vast majority of those murders
were committed with guns, usually handguns, and to a lesser extent, rifles and shotguns. Pew said
it’s not clear why there was such a rise, but it took a stab at guessing that it was related to the
hardships people had faced during the pandemic. Americans, it seems, don’t often take a stab at
things in the literal sense because guns are so widely available. If you look at a country
such as the UK, a country with relatively few murders, since guns aren’t easy to get,
many of the homicides are committed with knives. Getting shot is worse, though,
with one paper saying one-third of patients die with bullet wounds compared to the relatively
smaller 7.7 percent fatality rate for stab wounds. So, now those sobering facts have chilled your
bones, let’s talk about a kid that got shot in the head and survived. Yep,
that happens. In this case, the event took place in 2021 in a place called Frogtown.
From news reports, we can see that this 17-year old was able to talk to cops after he was shot,
but he was rushed to the hospital in a critical but stable condition. This means he was messed up,
but his vital signs were all in order. Luckily, the bullet didn’t penetrate his brain, or at
least we can assume that from the news reports. If you get shot in the head, you are in for a
rough ride, especially if the brain is hit. Many other headshots hit the face, or graze the head,
and that could end up with a less serious injury. Statistics tell us 42 percent of people who
get hit in the head survive, but it’s a totally different matter when the bullet enters the brain.
According to the Baltimore Sun, only five percent of people shot in the brain in the USA survive.
Medical experts say that your chance of survival is much higher if you are shot directly in the
front of the head. If the bullet penetrates the side, it’s pretty much always game over.
The reason is a bullet hitting the front might just destroy part of one of the brain’s
hemispheres unless it goes right down the midline. In that case, as with getting hit in the side,
the bullet might destroy both hemispheres and it ain't easy fighting another day after that.
But, if you do survive and only one side of the brain has been damaged,
you can expect to live the rest of your life with a disability. Since memory,
cognition and speech are controlled by both sides, a survivor could expect to
have problems with those important facets, not to mention the physical disabilities.
But we think you need some hard facts about bullets to the head, and thankfully, or
un-thankfully, they’re not hard to find in the US. In one very American story reported in 2021,
a couple of years ago one kid got bullied by another kid and so the bullied kid returned
later and shot the other kid in the head. This happened in Minneapolis.
The kid who did the shooting, actually got shot himself later by a cop during
a traffic stop involving an attempted arrest. The kid died, and the cop was
charged with second-degree manslaughter. That other kid, he survived getting shot
one time in the head, but he was left permanently disabled. News reports say now he has “permanent
mental and physical disabilities” and can’t live his life without the constant care of a
caretaker. In a lawsuit for the victim, it was claimed that he is now “not able to handle his
personal affairs or meet his basic living needs.” It seems this kid can still do certain things,
but if you do survive such a severe traumatic brain injury, there is a good chance you could
be left in a permanent vegetative state. With that in mind, when you think about Larry Flynt
getting it on with his penile implant – especially after he’d had those troublesome
nerves clipped – he came out alright next to most survivors who’ve taken a bullet to the brain.
Not that we ever want it to happen to someone, but we’d say it would be better to get hit in
the back than in the head. Even if the bullet makes contact with the worst spots, we reckon
you have more chance of a better life taking one to the spine than you do to that beautiful organ
in your head. That’s why we have thick skulls! Still, there’s a lot of luck involved with getting
shot. You can survive a head shot or a back shot and even live to smile about it, while a shot
that penetrates the flab in your leg could mean lights out. That’s because in your leg you have
the femoral artery. It’s easy to hit. Kids stab each other in the leg and think they won’t hurt
someone so much, but they end up doing time for murder. It’s the same with the arm, if you hit
the brachial artery you can easily kill someone. A guy name Ed Sizemore who works for the Federal
Law Enforcement Training Center's Firearms Division admitted that there are really bad
places to get hit, but he also said this: “People get shot in fatal areas and live, and others get
shot in non-lethal areas and die.” He said what we just said, that the brain is definitely the
worst place to get shot. The heart, he said, can be fixed if the person gets help very fast,
but with the brain, it’s not so easy to patch up. Now we need to talk about pain.
So far, we’ve discussed the worst places to get shot in terms of your chance of
dying and what will likely happen even if you survive, but we think we need to say something
about the places you can get shot that will make you howl like a banshee. Bear in mind,
many people have felt only a thud in their leg and bled to death without much pain at all.
Many people have talked online about when they were shot and said that they didn’t
feel much at all. Some have said all they felt was a kind of stabbing pain,
or like being hit by something, or being stung, but they said the worst pain was when they went
to hospital and had their wounds tended to. It’s not always like that, we assure you.
Let’s imagine you get shot in the foot, like Spider from the movie Goodfellas.
That’s going to sting a bit as the bullet will very, very likely break through all
those bones in the foot. Still, there are no arteries down there and no vital organs, and
since the foot is far away from any of those parts, you’re very likely going to make it.
We found a story in a medical journal of a 69-year-old man who’d accidently
shot himself in the foot while kangaroo hunting. While that would be forever a
good joke to tell your buddies, the damage was significant because the bullet was hollow point,
and the weapon was a 0.222 caliber rifle. That was enough to almost take his foot off.
He was one tough dude, driving himself home after the accident. He did that after he’d
fractured his second, third, fourth, and fifth metatarsals and lost lots of tissue.
Some of the bones couldn’t be wired because the bullet had completely shattered them.
Surgeons had to use something called a “gracilis muscle flap” to fill what they
called “the defect”, in laymen’s terms, space. In nine months, he was up and walking again
almost normally. He was very lucky. That same medical journal said that in
some cases of foot shooting there is so much damage to the bones and the soft tissue that
surgeons have to amputate below the knee. This just shows you that there's really
no good place to get shot, unless you count the earlobe or the hair.
Worse than being shot in the foot we think is being shot in the knee, something that
has served as a very painful punishment in the past – made famous in Ireland during The Troubles
when someone stepped out of line in a place where paramilitaries did their unique kind of policing.
It wasn’t supposed to kill a person, but you can be sure that the victim who’d committed
the perceived transgression would be forever traumatized by the experience. This wound
could not only break the cap of the knee, but also cause a fair bit of neurovascular damage.
If the wound was really bad, off came the leg. Sticking with Ireland, kneecapping was sometimes
reserved for people who sold drugs, but if the crime was really bad, the victim might have gotten
what was called a “six-pack”, which meant bullets to the knees, ankles and elbows. Jesus Murphy,
that must have hurt. So, in terms of the worst place to get shot, ask someone who had a six-pack.
We actually found someone who’d got a four-pack back in 2010. He told the BBC, “I was shot in
the shin, thigh, ankle and calf. I was in shock but shouted to my girlfriend, 'Call an
ambulance'. Then I passed out.” He’d been accused of selling drugs, although he denied he ever did.
It’s hard to believe it happened not that long ago since The Troubles are long gone, but it
seems some groups still do that kind of thing. We found evidence reported by the US National
institutes of Health that talked about 32 victims of fairly recent punishment shootings in Ireland.
The article suggested the days of the six-pack are over but explained this was
the outcome back in the day during The Troubles: “Typically, mortality with this technique was high
and the functional morbidity in survivors was extreme. As such, this made it unpopular within
the local communities the paramilitary groups were supposedly representing.”
So, the chance of dying was high and survivors were left with severe disabilities
regarding the body parts that were hit. We will go out on a limb here and say that being
shot in six of your joints is about as bad as it can get in terms of excruciating pain, that is,
if you don’t pass out. This is how one person said just getting shot once in one knee feels like:
“Getting shot in the knee (not just a glancing blow) is going to be immediately
and excruciatingly incapacitating. You won't be able to walk or crawl away.
You will just fall down and scream like a baby.” But do you remember that guy Ed Sizemore we talked
about, the one from the US Federal Law Enforcement Training Center's Firearms. He had something
different to say. He believed that getting shot in the femur would hurt the most, although he
was of course guessing. No one person could compare getting shot in every part of the body.
When we researched our pain shows we read countless articles that said the femur was
the most painful bone to break. It also depends on the grade of the injury, because grade one might
mean a light injury and a grade three femur injury could mean someone is close to death.
This is how a medical paper described a grade 2 femur injury after a bullet penetration:
“Segmental bone destruction is present with numerous small and large fragments. The bullet
has disintegrated and dispersed throughout a wide area of muscle and subcutaneous tissue.”
The paper only talked about pain once, saying, “The patient had constant thigh pain,
a fever, and persistent serosanguineous drainage from the bullet entry site.”
We can’t find anyone online talking about how getting shot in the femur felt like for them,
but after reading that paper, we think we will agree with Mr. Sizemore and say
this is definitely one of the worst places to take a bullet.
Ok, moving on to a spot we doubt you thought of. We imagine many of you have seen a movie made by
Quentin Tarantino that shows a man howling in pain after being shot.
One of the other characters says back to him, “Listen to me, your going to be fine,
along with the kneecap the gut is the most painful area a guy can get shot in. But it takes a long
time to die from it, I’m talking days. You’re gonna wish you were dead, but it takes days
to die from your wounds, time is on your side.” The movie, of course, is Reservoir Dogs and the
character is Mr. White played by Harvey Keitel. The question is, how much research did
Quentin Tarantino do before he wrote that part of the script?
He’s correct in saying that gut wounds are eminently treatable and as long as
the victim doesn’t get a catastrophic infection and the stomach acid doesn’t do too much damage
to other organs, the victim may well pull through and go on to live a normal life.
As for real life experiences, one person said this, “My old partner had been
shot in the stomach with a .45 pistol in Vietnam (off a bar stool in Saigon.)
He said he didn't feel anything at first, then it burned like a hot poker had been jabbed into him.”
Right below that comment is another secondhand story, this time from a soldier who said he was
told by another soldier about being hit in the stomach. The outcome was the same again,
with no immediate severe pain, but hot stinging after. We’re sure the morphine helped a bit too,
which the soldier later received. We found one guy who said getting
shot in the stomach wasn’t fun at all. He described his ordeal like this:
“For me, it is more of a ‘punch’ feeling than a piercing feeling. The bullet(s) do not easily
penetrate my abdominal muscles thus inner organ damage is either minimal or nonexistent.
For an average person, the bullet will travel into the small bowel, colon,
stomach…rupturing these organs. The contents, particularly the colon, cause site contamination
causing the victim to become septic and die from infection. This obviously hurts a
great deal. It’s not fun for me either. For weeks I had a huge bruise on my abdomen.”
So, yes, we’d say it’s a pretty bad place to get shot, but very much survivable.
Well done, Quentin, you did your homework.
Now you need to watch “Most Successful Weapons Ever Invented.”