Obviously I realise that being shot hurts but what I want to know is how or what was your initial reaction.
Did you feel pain first or was it just a sort of hard blow followed by pain.
Maybe you were knocked unconcious, if so what did you feel when you came round.
I don’t have any plans on shooting anyone, I’m just curious
Since the OP is asking for personal experiences, this is better for IMHO than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Except it’s in Great Debates, now. Kind of like when I got shot with an air pistol 
(It didn’t hurt, but it did draw blood, and it was made worse by the fact I didn’t even know the people who shot me from their car as I was running.)
.22 - Right arm - bounced off elbow.
I was 19, I remember not really feeling it at first but within a few minutes it started burning more than hurting and it hurt pretty bad for the following few weeks. It hit the bone at a very shallow angle so it didn’t really do any damage, just a very small scar as a souvineer. My initial reaction of course was “Oh shit! I’ve been shot!” There was a huge adrinaline rush even though the wound was very small. The only other time I felt that sort of panic was when I was thrown from a motorcycle at about 30mph. I landed and rolled, again with only minor injuries, but an intense rush and extreme panic, almost a psychotic reaction.
Never been fully penetrated, I have to wonder if it burns as well or if it is more of a general pain.
I had this too, also only comparable in my life to when I got sideswiped on my bicycle (I was able to hop right up and pick up the mountain dew can that was scattering along the road and drink the rest of it before I had to sit down due to the pain.)
It was indeed almost a psychotic reaction: I experienced some tunnel vision in that the only thing on my mind was the car in front of me that shot me and I was running toward it at what my mind thought was a pace I’d catch up to it at. I would have caught it, too, since it turned into a cul de sac when I was only 1 block away from it but a cop car happened to pass by that I flagged down but he refused to chase them.
I can only imagine the reaction if I had been thrown at 30 mph instead of ~12 or had been shot with a powder gun rather than an air gun.
When I was in college, I had an accidental discharge of a .22 caliber hand gun that was in an inside pocket of my jacket. It hit my thumb just behind the knuckle and went out the underside. It hurt, a lot. I’m no stranger to pain. I once reset my own dislocated shoulder. The gunshot was a much sharper and intense type of pain. When it first happened, it felt like someone had whacked my thumb with a broom handle. We wrapped the wound up in a bandanna to stop the bleeding and headed for the hospital. When they unwound that bandanna, holy shit. It was everything I could manage to keep from full throated screaming. The best I could manage was a long drawn out MMMMMMMMM, a la Marge Simpson. It was like holding my thumb in not quite boiling water, except that the water would have only affected the surface.
When I think about how minor that wound was compared to what some of our soldiers go through, my mind reels.
I think I’ve told this story before, but I can’t find it, so maybe not. Anyway:
A shotgun, loaded with rock salt, in the ass and upper thigh, at about 15 feet away, feels like a REALLY big hand slapping bare skin, then it goes numb for a while (until the adreniline wears off), then it feels like it’s on fire until the infection sets in. Then it becomes a localized but nonspecific “hurt.”
The part that is truly painful is when the nurse (who was also a reinforcing-the-lesson-pissed-off Aunt that never considered such things as topical anesthetics, even if they may have worked) cleaning the dirt/tiny pieces of denim/undissolved salt out of the three day old infected wound.
For the record, this injury was NOT a deliberate act of violence. It was the result of me being a dumbass in the company of other teenagers being dumbasses.
I have a follow-up question. I remember hearing a story years ago on NPR about the fact that both people and animals often physically “overreact” to being shot - I think they specifically mentioned the tendancy collapse on the spot even if the wound isn’t very serious (and long before the pain kicks in). They suggested that, in humans, the reaction is psychological, but they didn’t have any explanation for why it occurs in animals.
Have any of you who’ve been shot experience that or a similar reaction?
I have had some birshot at long range- it stung a bit. One bit had to be dug out a little.
Some idiot threw some .22’s into a campfire and one peice hit my leg. It was just a dep graze, and nothing remained in the wound. After the shock it hurt like hell.
From here, third paragraph from the end.
chowder, mate, you’re not thinking of hanging out with Dick Cheney, are you?
CMiller – I think that may well be true of many piercing injuries of that kind that come with tremendous force. The rush of adrenaline and the discharge of energy itself probably contribute to that sucker-punch feeling.
I haven’t been shot (!) but I have been stabbed (and punched) with a great deal of force – the injury didn’t register, either, other than as blunt force trauma with a significant amount of “heat” associated to it. Go figure.
A good friend of mine nearly got his leg blown off by a deer rifle when he was twelve or so. As he described it to me, he was at a friend’s house, and his friend was showing off all the (loaded) guns his dad had in the garage. My friend was sitting on the floor of the garage, when all of a sudden he couldn’t hear anything. He look at his friend, who was holding the rifle, and was white as a sheet. Then he looked down and saw that most of his calf was missing. Then he passed out. The next thing he remembers was waking up in the hospital after the surgery. He never actually felt the gunshot wound until days after the fact, and then only while pumped full of painkillers.
Remarkably, he recovered entirely. Despite having a chunk of flesh the size of his fist missing from the back of his leg, he has full use of it.
My former boss took several bullets from a machine gun during Vietnam. He sais the pain came in great waves (unbearably painful for a minute, then not so bad, then unbearably painful for a minute, then some relief) and that it was searingly hot. He passed out enroute to the field hospital and said when he came to after surgeries it was pretty much the same but muted as far as the “waves”.
ETA: He also said his reaction the entire time was, not surprisingly, “HOLY SHIT! I’VE BEEN SHOT!”- more surprise than pain or fear. Even though he’d been shot at several times and seen other men killed and had shot others and knew he was in a war zone, he said it was surreal- the first time he really realized that “there’s a good chance I can get *killed * here”. (He recovered enough to remain in the military until he got his 20 years in and then have a highly responsible career, but he still has two bullets in his body.)
Way to go, dad.
I had a .308 rifle blow up in my face. My face was covered with thousands of little blood dots.
It didn’t feel good.
A few months ago I was sitting around a campfire with some friends. One of them threw a 7.62X39 round in the fire. (Idiot!) Everyone took off running. About 45 seconds later we heard it go off. Bam!
So am I to assume that when Roy Rogers, Buck Jones, Tex Ritter and so forth took a 45 in the leg/arm they just shrugged it off as a minor irritant before offing Foul Frank the filthy fucker from Phoenix.
What?
I got hit by a steel ball (3/8ths of an inch) from a wrist rocket type hunting sling shot. Nothing compared to being shot by a “real” ammo round, but it still hurt so bad I thought I had been shot.
It hit me just below the rib on my left side, from about 4 feet away (thank’s little brother… revenge will involve you, a wheel chair, peanut butter and a trained weasel, when you are in your extreme old age… ha ha! I wait… I wait!)
The impact knocked the wind out of me, or made it nearly impossible to inhale with out terrible pain, and it left a bruise (Target shaped) that lasted for weeks. It kept me from doing any lifting for about two weeks.
FML