Forget the "Bushmaster" for a moment...

and let's talk about the .223 bullet itself. It sounds like the perfect bullet for hunting.... oh... let's say 6 year old kids and firefighters!

The .223 breaks up more than other bullets. After it hits someone, the .223 round tumbles and fragments as it punches deeper into the body, multiplying the damage.

If the bullet is fired as a hunting round, with its lead tip exposed, the tip flattens and widens to as much as a half-inch as it travels before it fragments into a "lead snowstorm" pattern of many tiny bits.
If fired as a military round, with a "full metal jacket" of steel or copper covering the round, it may turn sideways and break in two after hitting someone.

For a little bullet, the 5.56 (.223) bullet produces quite dramatic wounds.   While the traditional 30-06 caliber bullet of the M1 Garand and 7.62 bullet of the M14 rifle would immediately knock a man down, the 5.56 bullet instead enters the body, quickly turns sideways after passing through only 4" of flesh, then breaks in two major pieces, as well as many smaller fragments.  During the Vietnam War, soldiers reported that shooting an enemy soldier with the M16 did not kill as quickly as the old 30 caliber weapons. Instead soldiers would follow a massive trail a blood a few feet away from where the enemy soldier had been hit to find him dead from massive blood loss.  Thus what was nominally a full-metal-jacket bullet had in effect roughly the same destructive capability as some hollow- or soft-point bullets

So the .223 round (like our former allies the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein – we can really pick 'em can't we?!) is just another tool that has come back to haunt us.

Famous for its use in the military's M-16 rifle, the .223-caliber round is known for causing extensive tissue damage, says surgeon Ron Maier of the Northwest Regional Trauma Center at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

Like all high-velocity bullets, the .223 slug passes through the body with an accompanying shock wave that whipsaws blood vessels and organ tissue that are inches away from the bullet. It’s called hydrostatic shock.
The "cavitation," or cavity, caused by the high-velocity shock wave may briefly expand the diameter of the bullet hole almost 2 inches, about 10 times the width of the slug itself, before it collapses behind, tearing tissue further.

Exotic weaponry has become a staple of movies and entertainment in recent years, but this is the reality we are seeing. And now it is completely out of control.

Here's a wound diagram. Youtube has lots of videos of bullet channels in ballistic gel.


....Scrounged from many sources including... http://www.gunsandcrime.org/lethalty.html

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/steinreich6.html

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-10-22-bullets-usat_x.htm