Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum holds an AR-15 assault rifle at a shooting range during his presidential campaign on January 30, 2016.
- Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator in Pennsylvania, suggested that students learn CPR instead of advocating for stricter gun control laws.
- Medical doctors strongly pushed back against Santorum's statement, explaining that gunshot victims often bleed to death before CPR can be administered.
- Research shows high-velocity bullets can leave a wound five to 10 times larger than the width of the bullet itself.
Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator and Republican who previously ran for president, suggested over the weekend that student protestors should learn CPR instead of pushing for stricter gun control laws.
"How about kids - instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem - do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that, when there is a violent shooter, that you can actually respond to that?" Santorum, who is also a CNN commentator, said during a Sunday broadcast of the network's show "State of the Union."
Santorum made the remarks while roughly two million people at hundreds of "March for Our Lives" events across the US rallied against gun violence in America.
The student-led protests commenced after 17 people were shot to death at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. In the February 14 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, a 19-year-old former student is believed to have committed the murders using a legally purchased AR-15 assault rifle.
David Hogg, a survivor of that school shooting and a "March for Our Lives" organizer, responded to Santorum's remarks in a broadcast on CNN.
"There are many programs that work to ensure, especially in communities that are heavily affected by gun violence, [...] that students are able to respond and administer whatever first aid they can, assuming the person is still alive," Hogg said on Sunday. "But at the end of the day, if you take a bullet from an AR-15 to the head, no amount of CPR is going to save you because you're dead."
Medical doctors on Twitter joined Hogg's criticism of Santorum's remarks, noting that CPR is often futile following gunshot wounds.
"Gobsmackingly uninformed," tweeted Dr. Heather Sher, a radiologist in Florida. "CPR is not effective with catastrophic bleeding."
Joseph Sakran, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medicine and self-described gun violence survivor, tweeted: "Victims that go into cardiac arrest after #GunViolence are Bleeding to Death. CPR is NOT effective in this situation."
Santorum did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
Why gunshot wounds can be so damaging that CPR doesn't work
Nathan Boor & Kurt Groover/Aimed Research/Wikimedia Commons
Ballistic gelatin is a model for how soft tissues respond to gunshot wounds.
To humanely probe the physics of gunshot wounds, and ultimately help police solve crimes and doctors save lives, researchers shoot bullets into inert, flesh-like substances.
In many cases, they use a large block of synthetic gelatin and water to simulate the impact of a speeding bullet on human tissue.
Here's an example from the YouTube channel EffectiveAffect of what a gunshot simulation in gelatin looks like. This bullet was moving at about 2,900 feet per second through 575 cubic inches of gelatin.
Many factors determine how damaging bullet wounds can be. The type of gun and bullet used, the range of the shot, where on the body a person was shot, and whether or not the bullet exited the body afterward all make a difference.
But some basic principles remain: When a bullet is traveling at supersonic speeds, it partially slows down the moment it hits a person. The energy of the blast needs to go somewhere, so it radiates outward from the bullet's path to the surrounding tissues. This creates a much larger "mushrooming" effect, which you can see above.
This temporary ballooning of tissue is actually what causes the most damage, according to a post on Mongabay.com. The billowing flesh lacerates blood vessels and surrounding organs, tissues, and bone.
The Washington Post reported in June 2017 that this shockwave can leave a track of wounding as much as "five to 10 times wider than the bullet."
Gelatin isn't a perfect proxy for the human body. We have bones and cartilage, which can skew the bullet's path, sending it into a tailspin that could cause it to break apart and get lodged in different spaces, further complicating the severity of the wound.
This why an increasing number of researchers are turning to advanced computer simulations. Such models can recreate the complex layers of tissue in the human body to study a practically infinite number of grievous wounds from all angles, speeds, and styles of bullets (or even shrapnel from mines and improvised explosive devices).
A model that debuted in 2015, for example, simulated a human leg, its skin, muscle, bone, large arteries, and even small veins. Then it applied the physics of fluid dynamics to explore the origins of traumatic blood loss, and the best methods to stop that bleeding.
But as Alex Ossola reported for Popular Science, this and other models aren't perfect - so there's still a lot left for scientists and doctors to learn. This makes gunshot wounds as enigmatic as they are damaging and dangerous.
Julia Calderone and David Choi contributed to this post.