Firing A Weapon Might Hurt Your Brain

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2024

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Some weapons used by the United States military are so powerful, they can pose a threat to the people who fire them — even in training. When weapons are fired, an invisible blast wave travels through the brains of anyone nearby. Exposure to lots of these blasts over time — even low level ones — has been shown to cause brain health problems for service members.

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0:20.6	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:26.0	Hey Short Waivers, so today we're going to get into something pretty heavy.
0:30.0	How some weapons used by the US military are so powerful
0:32.8	they can pose a threat to people who fire them,
0:35.4	even in training.
0:36.8	Imagine a 300 pound linebacker hitting you
0:40.3	in the chest at full speed.
0:42.2	It rattles your cage it's like boom and it hits
0:46.3	your your cage and it rattles it and it also rattles your head.
0:49.4	John our regular listeners know you as a correspondent on the science desk here at NPR.
0:54.0	Yep, that's me.
0:55.3	And as part of that job, for a long time, you've been looking into how firing certain weapons
0:59.5	may affect a person's brain.
1:01.5	That's right. And that has meant talking to a whole lot of people, you
1:04.6	know military personnel scientists etc about this problem and one of the people I
1:10.0	talked to was William Wilcox that is who we were just listening to. He was a
1:14.7	tow gunner in the Marines who fired a whole lot of heavy weapons in the 1990s.
	...

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