Target Shooting and Brain Injury: Admissions about Unknown Forces and Individual Variability

I read an interesting article in The New York Times: Target Shooting Could Be Causing Brain Injuries.

(Here’s the link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/03/us/gun-ranges-brain-injuries.html?smid=em-share)

It was interesting to me in part because it confirmed what many “experts” on the defense side deny: sub-concussive events can add up over time and make people more susceptible to brain injury.

But there was more to it than just acknowledging the significance of sub-concussive events.

The article confirmed that neurologists don’t know how much force, acceleration, etc. it takes to cause brain injury and, even if they did have an “average” measurement, there is so much individual variability it would be meaningless.

Here are some of the significant take-aways:

• The brain is a delicate network of about 100 trillion connections with a consistency close to Jell-O. Experts don’t yet know what level of blast can damage the tissue, or whether blasts that are safe in limited numbers can cause harm with repeated exposure.

• Repeated small exposures may cause damage that accumulates unnoticed. A researcher compared the stress put on neurons to what happens to a well-used rubber band. “Stretch a rubber band a hundred times and it bounces back, but there are micro tears forming,” he said. “The hundred-and-first time, it breaks.”

• One person may feel fine after shooting, and another may feel concussed, because not everyone is affected in the same way. Age, fitness level, prior history of contact sports, pre-existing brain injuries and other factors may all make some people more vulnerable than others.

Maybe it’s not going to happen this year. Or next year. But at some point in the not too distant future society is going to look back at neurologists as the biggest charlatans since the doctors who testified for the tobacco companies that cigarette smoking didn’t cause cancer.