Well folks, you may be interested to know that I am doing some research into bullets and MRI units. In fact last year I collected a few samples of fired and unfired bullets and crawled into the bore of a 1.5T machine here in London. Obviously I had a special enclosure for the bullet, one that I made myself from perspex, wood and brass screws. Here is a picture of the enclosure, positioned just outside the bore of the unit:
The bullet that is deflecting so markedly is a SJHP Norma in 9mmP. I pulled it out of a friend's cartridge in South Africa, not realising at the time that it was ferrous otherwise I would have recorded more details. I don't know anything else about that ammunition. But what you can see is that there is a marked deflection towards the magnet and it is dangerous (anything more than 45 degrees between plumb and deflector line is dangerous). Another Norma that was a SJ truncated cone was also dangerously ferrous.
Now to show you how hardcore I am
I took pictures with my digital camera, almost in the bore of the machine. I was holding the camera by hand and the battery is highly ferrous. I can tell you my grip was quite good becuase if I let the camera go it would be very expensive to scrape it off the inside of the bore! As I got closer with the camera the magnetic field affected the electronics. See the picture below. At this stage the image suffered from extreme noise and the sensor went to blue. A few more centimetres closer and the zoom operated by itself and a few more centimetres closer the camera suffered a total failure that could not be fixed by switching off and on. I had to leave it for 5 minutes before I could switch it on again. So we are certainly dealing with a really strong magnet, one that makes those junkyard cranes look like a lucky-packet magnet. Note that in the picture below I rotated the jig 90 degrees because I was looking for lateral deflection in the center of the bore.
Back to the bullets, I tested about 20 different types and found 4 that were very dangerous and one that had a very small deflection (only a few degrees). The one that deflected only a few degrees was an early Eliminator in 9mmP. That was back in the days when they were only being sold in SA and they were called 'Eliminator.' I tested newer versions and there is no deflection (at least not on the 9mmP versions). There must have been a ferrous impurity in the early version.
The three dangerous ones (all had more than 45 degree deflection) were:
1) Sellier and Bellot steel jacketed and steel cored Tokarev bullet
2) Norma SJHP in 9mmP
3) Norma SJ truncated cone in 9mmP
4) An unidentified bullet in .357
Here is a picture of the unknown bullet (handed to me by a friend here at a shooting range in London). He doesn't know what it is, perhaps someone here can suggest possible manufacturers...
The other thing is, we have to consider the fact that custom bullet makers may use ferrous materials as inserts or for jacketing. So in terms of the possibility of a .380 being ferrous, I have to say it is possible (even if the chances are slim).
Whether the bullet, upon fragmenting against a vest, could fling a daughter fragment into the guy's head is another matter. What was the supposed entry point according to the show? Did it go through the orbit or did it enter the arterial circulation at the neck and then become a vascular embolus? Regardless of what happened, the main problem in a situation like that is the recognition by radiological means of the type of ammunition with a view to determining whether it has ferrous components or not. In other words it is one thing to identify on X-ray an intact Black Talon bullet (knowing that it is non-ferrous) and it is quite another to try to evaluate only a fragmnet of a projectile on X-ray with a view to determining its type for ferrous assessment. If such a fragment is in the leg or arm, the radiographer may advance the patient little by little into the scanner and stop immediately if the patient signals any discomfort. But in the head, there is no room for messing around. There is too much at stake, unlike a fragment embedded in muscle. If they cannot determine whether it is ferrous or not they will treat it as if it is ferrous and proceed from there. In the head that means more than likely no scan. No sir.
