The mass murder last week at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has something in common with the deadliest massacres in the United States: the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Variations of the AR-15 were used in this month’s massacre at a Buffalo supermarket; at a Walmart in Texas in 2019; a Florida high school in 2018; a Texas church and a concert in Las Vegas in 2017; and Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. The AR-15 style weapon is the most popular rifle in America with over 11 million. And they are rarely used in crime. But the AR-15 is the favorite weapon of the worst mass murderers. AR-15 ammunition travels up to three times the speed of sound. And as we first showed you in 2018, we’ll cut it short, so you can see why the AR-15’s high-speed ammunition is the fear of all American emergency rooms.
The mass shootings were once so shocking that they were impossible to forget. They have now become so common that it is difficult to remember them all. In October 2018, at a Pittsburgh synagogue, eleven died and six were injured.
The roses remember the people who died in the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas
FBI Special Agent Robert Jones: This is the most horrible scene I’ve seen in 22 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Members of the Tree of Life Synagogue performing a peaceful service at their place of worship were brutally murdered by an armed man who attacked them simply for their faith.
Just 11 months earlier, it was a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Fire Chief Rusty Duncan was one of the first to arrive.
Rusty Duncan: 90 percent of the people there were unrecognizable. You know the blood everywhere, I mean it just covered them from head to toe. They were shot in so many different places that it was impossible to tell who they were.
The church is now a memorial to the 26 who were killed.
Rusty Duncan: I’ve never had the experience, not even with any kind of weapon like this. To me seeing the damage it did was amazing, it shattered the concrete, you know, you can only imagine what it does to a human body.
Scott Pelley: Police estimate he fired about 450 rounds of ammunition.
Rusty Duncan: Oh, I think so. I saw the harm he did. I saw the holes in the church from side to side, all the benches, the concrete, the carpet, I saw it all.
A gunshot wound is potentially fatal, regardless of the type of ammunition used. But Cynthia Bir showed us the difference in an AR-15 round against gelatin targets in her ballistics lab at the University of Southern California.
Cynthia Bir with correspondent Scott Pelley
Cynthia Bir: Years of research have been done on what the makeup of this artillery jelly should look like to really represent what damage you would see to your soft tissues.
Scott Pelley: So this is a pretty accurate representation of what would happen to a human being?
Cynthia Bir: Yeah Al that sounds pretty crap to me, Looks like BT aint for me either.
“The organs will not only be broken or bruised, they will be, parts of them will be destroyed.”
This is a 9mm bullet from a pistol, which we captured in slow motion. The bullet of the pistol traveled about 800 miles per hour. It was cut almost straight through the ice.
Now look at the AR-15 round.
Cynthia Bir: Do you see the difference?
Scott Pelley: Yes.
He is three times faster and hits more than twice as hard. The shock wave of the AR-15 bullet exploded a large ice cavity unlike the pistol bullet.
Scott Pelley: Come on. There is a huge difference. You can see it right away.
Cynthia Bir: Yes, exactly. Here are fragments. There, he made a curve and came out. A much larger area can be seen in terms of the fractures inside.
Now look down. At the top, the pistol, at the bottom, the AR-15.
Scott Pelley: Just exploded.
Cynthia Bir: It’s exploded and it’s falling. What happens is that this particular round is designed to fall and break.
The 9mm pistol has a larger bullet, but this AR-15 has more gunpowder, accelerating its speed. Both the round and the rifle were designed in the 1950s for the military. The result was the M16 for our troops and the AR-15 for civilians.
Cynthia Bir: There will be a lot more damage to the tissues, both bones, organs, everything that comes close even to this bullet path. The bones will not only break, they will break. The organs will not only be broken or bruised, they will be, parts of them will be destroyed.
This pretty much describes the injuries Joann Ward, 29, suffered. At Sutherland Springs Baptist Church, she was shot more than 20 times while covering her children. Ward was dead, her daughters were mortally wounded, while Assistant Fire Chief Rusty Duncan headed from the back of the shrine.
Rusty Duncan
Rusty Duncan: When I climbed a couple of rows, Ryland’s hand reached out from under his stepmother and grabbed my leg from my pants. I wouldn’t even know he was alive until he did. I didn’t even see him under her. Well, this is where he and I first made eye contact.
Joann Ward’s five-year-old stepson, Ryland Ward, was beaten five times and was almost gone when trauma surgeon Lillian Liao arrived at San Antonio University Hospital.
Scott Pelley: What part of Ryland’s blood do you think was lost before it came to you?
Lillian Liao: At least half.
This is Ryland’s ER x-ray.
Lillian Liao: You see the two bullet fragments in it.
Scott Pelley: The x-ray shows you the solid fragments of shrapnel and bullets, but it doesn’t tell you much about the damage to the soft tissue.
Lillian Liao: No, and it doesn’t tell you what’s inside. I mean a bomb exploded inside. And our job is to get in there and clean it up.
Scott Pelley: A bomb exploded inside due to the shock wave of these high speed rounds.
Lillian Liao: That’s right.
Ryland underwent 24 surgeries to repair his arm, leg, pelvis, intestines, kidney, bladder and hip.
Lillian Liao: At some point it’s like reuniting Humpty Dumpty.
Scott Pelley: What do you mean?
Lillian Liao: Well, their organs are now in different pieces and you have to rebuild them. His arm was missing soft tissue, his skin, muscle and part of his nerves were damaged. The gut needs to be reassembled, some of the areas of injury need to heal on their own so that you can see that you can walk like a normal child and behave as normally as possible.
Lillian Liao
With the AR-15, it’s not just about the speed of the bullet, it’s also about how fast hundreds of bullets can be fired. The AR-15 is not a fully automatic machine gun. Just shoot one round with each trigger pressure. But in Las Vegas it sounded like a machine gun.
An additional special device called a bump stock allowed the killer to pull the trigger quickly enough to kill 58 and injure 489. In other mass killings, the AR-15 fired without a bump stock, but even then, it can shoot about 60. one-minute rounds. Ammunition magazines with a capacity of up to 100 cartridges can be replaced in about five seconds.
Maddy Wilford: I remember hearing the shots and being so nervous and scared and all of a sudden I felt something hit me.
Scott Pelley: How many times have you been shot?
Maddy Wilford: Four times.
Scott Pelley: How many surgeries?
Maddy Wilford: Three. By my arm, my stomach and my ribs and lungs.
Maddy Wilford
In February 2018, 17-year-old Maddy Wilford was at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. 17 were killed and 17 wounded.
Maddy Wilford: And I just remember thinking for myself, there’s no way, like, not me, please, not me. I still don’t want to go.
Laz Ojeda: His vital signs were almost non-existent. it looked like all the blood had come out of his body. He was in a state of deep shock.
Paramedic Laz Ojeda rescued Maddy Wilford in part because the Broward County EMS was recently equipped for battlefield injuries caused by the AR-15.
Laz Ojeda: We bring teams of active killers to our rescue.
Scott Pelley: Active Killer Kits?
Laz Ojeda: Yes.
Scott Pelley: What is this?
Laz Ojeda: This is a kit that has five tourniquets, five decompression needles, five hemostatic agents, five emergency trauma dressings.
Dr. Peter Antevy, Broward County Medical Director, told us that today’s injuries require a new type of training.
The explosive force of AR-15 style rifles 05:39
Peter Antevy: If I take you by one of our ambulances or by our protocols, almost everything we do is based on what the military has taught us. We never wore tourniquets. We never wore chest seals. These were things that were done in the military for many, many years.
Scott Pelley: When did all this change?
Peter Antevy: I think that really changed after Sandy Hook.
After Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 first-graders and six educators were killed with AR-15 rounds, a nationwide campaign called “Stop the Bleed” began. Antevy and the doctors, including Lillian Liao in San Antonio, are training civilians who are really the first to respond. There have been more than 100,000 classes like this in the last seven years.
Peter Antevy: The day after the shooting, my kids are waking up and it’s “time to go to school.” And, my son heard how he listened to what happened the night before, when I was on stage, and he looked at me with the fear of God that I had to go to school that day. My first instinct was, “You need a bleeding kit.” My son has a bleeding kit in person today.
Scott Pelley: How old are you?
Peter Antevy: …