On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 11:41:14 -0700, "John Hightower"
wrote:

From the USA Today article Willi referenced they indicate that they were
using #7-1/2's which seems right- so maybe they are looking at a cluster of
two or more pellets or a really deformed pellet.

I doubt it would be a single deformed pellet. Given that there's all
sorts of misreporting out there - reports vary from 6 to 200 pellets,
for example - I'm leaning toward either the doctor giving lay people a
general measurement, not realizing that his "ballpark" number would be
picked apart on ROFF, or a misreported number is being recycled.

Either way, I merely found it interesting, and it mainly caught my eye
because it happened to be _5_ mm, which is a fairly common air rifle
pellet size - the aforementioned Sheridan, for example - and roughly the
"tweener" size between a .177/BB and .22 (sort of like a 16 ga is to the
12 and 20). Knowing instinctively that 5mm is larger than a BB, and a
BB is roughly twice the size of either a 7 1/2 or 6, it seemed obvious
to me that _something_ was inaccurate.

But at this point, I don't think the diameter of the pellet(s) is/are
particularly important.

TC,
R