Yep, Weedhound. The guys and the story said it perfectly. It was one of his two femoral arteries. The only bigger artery in the body is the aorta, which is the outgoing vein from the heart and runs right down the middle of your body in front of the spinal cord, then branches off in the abdomen into the femorals, which are vessels the size of a good-sized finger. A femoral artery gunshot wound drain someone just as fast as the heart could pump out the blood, practically. Folks who bleed out that much don't stand a chance. They lose too much blood, go into shock (that's what happens when the blood pressure falls rapidly), and often what blood remains in the body does strange things like try desperately to clot and cause strokes. A wound like that would practically have to be made on an operating table with the patient already under anesthesia and with a trauma surgeon standing at the ready to be something a victim could recover from.

The story is awful, and I have a real hard time believing that was a random home invasion. Someone beat down the guy's locked bedroom door, then aimed low with that gun and shot. Folks who've done weapons training learn to shoot for the body's core, like in the chest, because that's the biggest, most central, most likely to be hit target. Or they learn to aim for the head (at least snipers learn this). That's another reason something doesn't feel right about this killing. It sounds a lot more deliberate to me than a random home-invasion robbery gone bad.

If you lie down quietly and put your finger tips on your groin just to either side of where your pubic hair is and feel the spot there in your groin where there's a little indentation, you'll feel a nice, strong pulse. That's the pulse of your femoral arteries.