Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Killing versus stopping

I think that is a bit unfair. There's any number of highly educated people who have no grounding in mechanics, and no real need to know it. FWIW my sister is a vet, and teaches it at university. Her husband is a professor in veterinary medicine, specialising in equine virology. I doubt they'd ever have any need to consider the difference between elastic and inelastic collisions, and I doubt they've even thought about anything to do with them since high school.

Unfortunately for those of us with an engineering background or interest in physics, there are many people who really have very little knowledge of this stuff, nor any practical reason to know it.



There's a range of ways the kinetic energy is "lost". Energy is used to do work, pushing bits of animal out of the way of the bullet, tearing through skin, muscle and organs and breaking bones (or, at a finer scale, breaking molecular bonds). Some gets turned into sound and some into heat. It doesn't really matter much in a practical sense though, because ultimately what kills the animal is damage to structures vital to sustaining life, and that depends on a number of factors. Crudely, a bullet whose path transects something important, and which has the construction and momentum to drive through and cause enough damage along the way.