TV Complaints

One thing that drives me nuts when I watch a TV show or movie is when the show presents information about things I know about, and the information is so completely wrong it's insane. Since I know a lot about computers, and history, and science this happens pretty often, which explains why I don't watch much TV.

The topic where it makes me the most crazy is guns though. Every time I see a bullet spark when it hits something I cringe, and I've seen movie bullets spark when they hit TREES.

I'm going to give some spoilers for last night's episode of House, so if you didn't see it yet and plan to stop reading.

What little I saw of this show last night, before I retired grumbling to the bedroom, revolved around a police officer who'd been shot, the bullet hit his vest, fragmented, and fragments shot upward and hit his eye socket lodging in his brain. We'll leave alone the fact that soft body armor is intended to capture a bullet, not fragment it, it COULD have hit something hard in his pocket before reaching the vest.

This being the show that it is, the cop had other serious medical issues besides hunks of metal in his skull. The preferred diagnostic was an MRI, but the doctors were afraid to perform an MRI because he was shot with a .38 Special hollowpoint, and those bullets are ferro-magnetic.

Huh?

I've fired and seen thousands of rounds of .38 Special cartidges, both hollowpoint and non-hollowpoint. Most have been basic lead alloys, some have been lead alloys with copper jackets. "ferro" means iron (I guess ferro sounds better than iron). Still, I guess it's possible that someone manufactured rounds with iron-based bullets (they used to make them in .22 specifically for use in shooting galleries with steel targets just so they would spark, they also wore out rifle barrels in a hurry). I have to ask myself why any sane engineer would design iron hollowpoint bullets for a .38 though. Hollowpoints are intended to expand to create a bigger wound and also to keep the slug from going completely thru the intended target and hitting someone else. The .38 Special is a low-velocity round, so if a bullet is going to expand it has to be made of soft stuff. Now what's softer, lead or iron?????

But wait, there's more! Our hero decides to test if the bullet in question posed a problem in an MRI, so he gets a similar cartridge, loads it in a revolver, and brings it to the morgue where he shoots a corpse with it, they then MRI the corpse to see what the bullet did.

Now, I'm no doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but I know enough about both bullets and MRI machines to figure out if a particular bullet would cause a problem in an MRI without having to use someone's dead relative for a test. I'd start by bringing my bullet, not to the morgue, but to the kitchen. I'd then pull a magnet off of the refridgerator and see if it would stick to the bullet. If so I know I'd have a problem. If not I'd probably, just for the sake of safety, pull the bullet from the cartridge and just MRI the bullet, if it flew in the machine I know we'd have a problem, if not I'd know we wouldn't.

Of course this wouldn't make for very good theater, which is the bottom line here. It's much more dramatic to make up a problem where one wouldn't exist in reality. It's much more dramatic to have a shocking method of determining if there's a problem than a simple method.

What happened? I didn't watch that far, maybe my wife will answer in the comments (hint hint).