Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

If you have been firing a whole day, you definitely fell funny in the head.

Ear protecting does not protect brain much. It protects hearing. Brain heals from very mild damage when there is time to rest, but when you shoot all day, day after day, the damage can accumulate. One already recognized problem area is the show wave getting between helmet and skull. It can amplify the impact.

Nobody knows what the impact from very frequent rifle training is. Very people few do that. Once a month in the range is probably not enough.

View on HN

Modern combat helmets don’t leave a “gap” between head and helmet, the “gap” is filled with padding to absorb impact/shock and improve comfort.

the kind of shock that padding absorbs is not the kind of shock we're talking about here; we're talking about supersonically propagating pressure waves which create discontinuities in the pressure field, as well as the temperature field and the velocity field. to my surprise modern combat helmets are designed to protect against those to some extent, but padding is irrelevant to that; to shock waves, it's effectively a gap. the padding protects you from things that could displace the helmet until it hits your head, such as bullet impacts

People that hunt and shoot guns their whole lives do not commit suicide at high levels. This is what I am basing my statements on. Basically half the people I know in the US fall in to this category.

Men in the special forces shoot firearms much, much more than even enthusiastic hunters. Thousands of rifle rounds in a day. All day long.

A hunter (I am one) might shoot a dozen rounds to zero in a rifle, or a hundred shells at a clay range. Actually hunting is never more than a handful of rifle rounds or a few dozen shells.

Shooting suppressed carbines and SMGs generates a completely different level of air pressure than Grandpa's 30-06 or Dad's .308.

Have you shot anything you mentioned? .30-06 and .308 are both quite powerful, and you can feel them in your chest when fired.

An M4 (the only carbine I can think of in use by the military) is already a step down in boom as a 5.56mm; adding a suppressor makes that even less so. It’s like shooting a .22 at that point. As to SMGs, they’re all small caliber – 9mm, .45, 5.7mm…

All of the above, yes.

I'm saying that a SEAL shooting a suppressed SMG feels nothing after dumping magazine after magazine downrange. There's no way this is causing concussions.

Grandpa's 30-06 will rattle your fillings a little bit after one round - still probably doesn't result in TBI.

That's not all SOF shoot, of course.

SCAR-H, M14 EBR, M249 SAWs and M240 all shoot 7.52mm x 51mm NATO (compatible with .308 but slightly different chamber pressures)

Sure, but we should be able to see if 0331 guys and the like have a higher incidence rate of suicide overall. Presumably they are spending far more time on these platforms than SOF.

The amount of shooting 0311 Rifleman does is fraction of what SOF does. The problem is accumulation of damage and no healing periods.

As I said, we don't if calibers below .50 cause significant damage when shooting in excessive amounts. Trying to figure it as a layman is useless. It's better to show epistemic humility than try to assert one way or another.

The FN Minimi (M249) fires 5.56. The others fire 7.62, not 7.52.

I shot a .50 a couple times and didn't feel much of anything tbh. Less of a shockwave than fireworks on July 4th.

I know the US can be gun obsessed at times but I struggle to believe that even a professional hunter who frequents the range in his spare time fires as many rounds in a given day as a Navy SEAL who's entire job description revolves around being trained to deliver rapid and precise attacks under extreme pressure, which is only possible with incessant drills and practice.

People that hunt and shoot guns their whole lives don't shoot guns their whole lives. They shoot guns a few times when hunting and then a lot of times at the range but at a leisurely pace. This is like comparing a package delivery guy who likes jogging to an Olympic athlete.

> Navy SEAL who's entire job description revolves around being trained to deliver rapid and precise attacks under extreme pressure

You'd be surprised how much time SOFs im general spend lying in a bush, peeing on bottles and radioing in updates. Although US SOFs may have been doing it less than others during GWOT. Not everything is DA.

(That doesn't change your general point though, and SOF training is extremely rigorous and demanding and does include a lot of shooting. But not all day every day.)

I mean, yeah, still, they're probably spending more time near explosions and gun shots in aggregate even if most of the missions are spent idling.

How often do you shoot your guns when you hunt?

sure, nobody knows, but physically it just seems implausible

Reply on news.ycombinator.com