do you think it s going to happen again? miah was one of several witnesses who gave heartbreaking and really disturbing testimony at the hearing about america s epidemic of gun violence. mass shootings are on pace to hit record levels this year. the parents of lexi rubio, who was killed at robb elementary we want as they implored lawmakers to change the country s gun laws. we don t want you to think of lexi as just a number. she was intelligent, compassionate, athletic. she was quiet, shy unless she had a point to make. if she knew she was right, as she so often was, she was firm, direct, voice unwavering. so today we stand for lexi and as her voice we demand action. we seek a ban on assault rifles and high capacity magazines. we understand that for some reason to some people, to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns that guns are more important than children. somewhere out there there s a mom listening to our testimony thinking i can t even imagine
now the people at the center of them are begging and pleading with their elected leaders to do something and do something now. a bipartisan group of u.s. senators has been trying to strike a narrow, modest deal on gun reforms, one of the lead negotiators telling me in the last hour he is cautiously optimistic that they can get something done. despite ongoing talks on capitol hill today, it is still legal in most states for an 18-year-old to buy a semiautomatic weapon. josh campbell went to a gun range to show us just what such a weapon can do. they are known as assault style weapons. and have been used in some of the country s deadliest shootings. from uvalde, tulsa, and el paso, to parkland, san bernardino, and sandy hook, it has been the weapon of choice for many of the killers. line is hot. the los angeles police department demonstrates an ar-style semiautomatic rifle for us on the department s gun range. you have a 16-inch to 20-inch barrel. you have a stock that
cause. brain surgeon and cnn chief medical correspondent dr. sanjay gupta has a new essay on cnn.com where he reaccoucounts one of h most memorable moments from med school. his professor took them to a gun range to illustrate the havoc that a rifle can cause on a watermelon. i saw the watermelon shudder as it was struck, and then immediately saw a significant amount of red tissue fly out of the back side. upon inspection, the first thing i noticed was how much bigger the exit wound was compared to the entrance, and after opening the watermelon, the purpose of the demonstration became clear. instead of a predictable linear track, the watermelon looked like it had been cored out, and what was left was shredded. he explained that this was a phenomenon known as cavitation. the bullet doesn t just travel through the body, it creates a big cavity inside it. the uvalde pediatrician
velocity times the mass of the bullet, but it s just going so much faster coming out of one of these ar-15 type rifles that overall the amount of energy that is then transferred into the body is much, much higher. the process that josh was talking about is something known as cavitation. it literally causes cavities within the body. whereas a handgun, for example, much less energy, will go straight through, a linear line, a bullet sized line through that. what the rifle, because of that energy, it creates that cavity instead. you have witnessed injuries like these first-hand when you were in iraq covering the war there. tell us what you saw. yeah, you know, when i was in iraq, you may remember, that was during the time there was a ban on these types of weapons. we weren t seeing a lot of these types of injuries here in the united states. so the first time for me was really on the battlefield, and it s tough to describe even. you know, limbs really kind of