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STAFF SERGEANT NICK <\/span>Lavery wasn\u2019t only the most physically imposing Green Beret on our team, he was the most physically imposing soldier any of us had ever seen. He was 6\u20195\u2033, approaching 280 pounds, and cut like a linebacker\u2014the position at which he excelled, not coincidentally, as a college football player at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He was a weapons specialist, and an expert in hand-to-hand combatives. If Army scientists and tattoo artists had highjacked a Darpa lab to create the ultimate soldier, they would have created Nick. But that wouldn\u2019t prevent a single gunshot to the leg from nearly killing him.<\/p>\n Most of what we learn about gunshot wounds, we learn from watching television. A small sliver of this programming is actually educational, like the ballistics tests performed onMythbusters<\/em>. (Some lessons: Bullets fired into liquids will stop or disintegrate rather than slice through seawater a laSaving Private Ryan<\/em>, and a weapon that would blow a victim backwards would also blow the shooter back.) But these examples are outliers. Depictions of gun violence in fictional shows and movies are routine, and often wildly imaginative. Those depictions are distorting understanding of what bullets can\u2014or can\u2019t\u2014do to bodies.<\/p>\n As a combat medic in Afghanistan, I treated a variety of gunshot wounds. And as the husband of an emergency room provider at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, gun violence has remained\u2014at least peripherally\u2014a significant part of my life. This year, murder rates in Baltimore are on track\u00a0to surpass death tolls generated by the crack epidemic. Through conversations I\u2019ve had with ER doctors at Johns Hopkins, in addition to my own combat experience, I can offer a few tips you won\u2019t learn at the movie theater. This isn\u2019t just about exposing Hollywood sophistry: It\u2019s about knowing what to do if you ever find yourself near or among the 297 or so people in America who are shot each day in homicides, assaults, suicides, suicide attempts, accidental shootings, and police interventions.<\/p>\n