A Brief, Violent and Painful Look at Kneecapping

A group of four kids coming home from the bars near my neighborhood last weekend were held up by some other kids, one of whom had a gun. While three (including two girls) were pistol whipped, one was shot in the knee or kneecapped in other parlance. I was running a search for news of the shooting, which soon turned into an investigation of the custom and effects of kneecapping.

A typical search will yield scant data on the practice of injuring a human's knee with a firearm, drill or blunt instrument. Use of the term is widespread, but willy-nilly. There's a group on Facebook for people interested in kneecapping, which so far amounts to ten people. The word kneecap was hugely prominent in the 2008 presidential election, with Hillary Clinton cited as having lost superdelegates for "kneecapping" Barack Obama. Barack Obama, in turn, used a slang term for the slang term of kneecapping, "Tonya Harding," during a stump speech. Tonya Harding, famous for allegedly asking her husband Jeff Gilhooley to kneecap her figure skating rival Nancy Kerrigan before she could beat Harding in the 1994 Winter Olympics, spoke out against Obama's use of her name.

Kneecapping is also frequently used in regard to business or regulations. Once in office, Obama's administration was said to have kneecapped the payday lending industry through new usury restrictions. In the business world, observers wondered if Apple was about to kneecap the cable industry as it moved to acquire Disney (and ABC). No need to worry apparently, another article said the Senate worried of cable giant Comcast kneecapping Hulu.

Less frequently found is word of the human suffering associated with kneecapping, a particularly nasty way to inflict pain and damage on the body. Any fan of Quentin Tarantino will have already thought of the first scene after the opening credits in Reservoir Dogs, where Mr. White assures Mr. Orange that as painful as it is to be shot in the stomach, in terms of pain that location is second to being shot in the knee. So he's got that going for him.

The knee is indeed arguably the most painful place to be shot. The knee joint is a bundle of bone, cartilage and muscle fibers and nerve bundles and because it has the whole package, a projectile that penetrates the joint has the opportunity to cause damage to all of these creating crushing, cavitation and laceration injuries. It's the presence of so much bone that leads to the most immediate pain, however, says Paula Owens, OPA at the Center for Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. Owens has treated a number of people who've sustained gunshot wounds to the knee and she says that injury to the bone is among the worst pain a person can tolerate.

Any joint that features a lot of bone would be a really painful place to get shot, says Owens, but what makes the knee so painful is the lasting damage that can be done. The knee provides mobility, so we tend to want to use it to walk, even after suffering a shooting. While the elbow is a painful place to be shot, points out Owens, you can still get up and move around. This is not so much the case with the knee. Earlier last century that kneecappings commonly resulted in amputations (warning, graphic images) and in an Irish study of cases in the mid-1970s, 10 percent of kneecappings still resulted in surgical removal of the affected limb.

Even with a small caliber gun, being shot in the knee can have lifelong effects. Bullets are made of lead, and those left lodged in the knee joint have the added bonus of being introduced to the surround tissue and even the bloodstream, since the synovial fluid that provides cushioning for the knee joint can dissolve lead. This can create chronic lead poisoning in the patient and lead to hypertrophy arthritis, a severe form of the degenerative disease.

I found that kneecapping using a small caliber bullet, usually a .22, was the preferred method of reprimand used by the IRA in Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. In fact, it appears that no other group, including the mafia, has used kneecapping as a method to inflict pain more than the IRA. The group generally forced the victim to lie down or face a wall; in both cases they were shot through the back, rather than the front of the knee. Typically the group, which served as de facto law enforcement in lawless Northern Ireland for several decades, doled out kneecappings to young hoods who had failed to heed earlier warnings against robbery and theft, men who were having affairs with wives of IRA men in prison, those who opposed the IRA or its politics and pretty much anyone who ran afoul of the group.

Kneecapping appears to have died off for awhile as a tool used by groups in the West after the IRA's power dwindled in the 90s, though a kneecapping by a paramilitary group in Northern Ireland took place as recently as last January. Around 2005, though, it made a reappearance in Australia among Sydney's biker gangs who use it as punishment and to send messages to rival drug dealers. What I couldn't find is any explanation for why some two-bit punk might shoot an unarmed, innocent person he's robbing in my neighborhood.

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