No, they die – but after singing.
Correct. Not the likeliest outcome by far, from a thrown knife. But one possible outcome. I’ve seen guys die from knife wounds; it generally took some time.
Y’know, I really have seen a bit too much in my lifetime. NOT like I was in a war zone or anything (well, Baltimore sometimes was like that) but cumulatively. Best not to reminisce, I think.
As Anna Russell said, you can portray anything on stage in opera, as long as instead of doing it you sing it (“and then they both do some very spirited singing”).
Need answer fast? 
Knife wounds are very unlikely to result in instant death, unless the brain is targeted succesfully. Bullet wounds can result in instant death without hitting the brain, but very often do not. In a lethal attack type situation, even 10 seconds of remaining mobility can result in all kinds of unpredictable scenarios.
I base this on the extensive body of evidence that stems from hunting human-sized animals.
A stab to the upper body from a knife is rarely fatal, like it is shown on TV. However, like all things it varies and it can be. The biggest issue that I have is that the stabbed character just falls over and dies quietly. I think even a fatal knife wound would involve a lot of flailing and fighting for at least 30 seconds. I have no experience in knife wounds, but I do know a couple of guys.
Yeah, I figure if someone flung a knife into me, I wouldn’t just go “oooof!” And fall over.
The guys I knew delivered several stabs and the opponent did not die
The classic Lifetime Movie scenario, where a small knife to the chest will finish the antagonist off, is pretty far-fetched. Or a lamp to the head, or a fall down a small flight of stairs.
I’ve shot maybe 4 elk and even with a perfect heart/lung shot with a rifle MUCH more powerful than the average human shooting firearm the animal takes minutes to die. A 7mm Remington Magnum shot in the heart/lungs basically pulps everything, but death is not instant by any means.
IME (EMT) highly variable for both but knives tend to be slower kills. When a bullet hits, it doesn’t just punch a hole, it creates a shockwave that displaces tissues in its path creating a temporary cavity much larger than the bullet itself.
Example
More than you wanted to know
Knives can create plenty of penetration but do not create the extra damage from the wound cavity effects of bullets. A knife wound can miss an artery by millimeters and not damage it. A bullet in the same path will in all probability shred that artery. Altercations involving knives also tend to result in alot of smaller more superficial cuts that individually would be relatively minor but a dozen of them can result in life threatening blood loss.
not being able to contribute with first hand experience, but the subreddit by the name of “combatfootage” (I am not linking it) - really surprised me for how long soldiers live after being hit by granedes and peppered with shrapnel.
Just y’day was a vid doing the rounds with a russian soldier on fire running for quite some time after his tank was hit … going from memory here, but you can see him at the beginning of the vid … then another tank gets hit and then from an obtuse angle you can still see the person running while being on fire what seems 30 sec later.
Comments there are quite often along the line of “he’s dead, he just doesn’t know it yet” … so the whole adrenaline rush / flight instinct seems to be very strong (and in line of what has been said about big-game-killing)
A co-worker was building a cabin and put a nail through his had with an air-powered nail gun, back in the early days of the internet. To cheer him up (or something else) a few people sent him the X-ray picture of a guy who had shot and lodged several nail-gun nails into his skull. He apparently lived.
I presume that was because although nails can cause traumatic injury and possible loss of certain functions, most of them don’t have anywhere near the shock wave effect of a bullet.
Here’s another example of what comes to mind using a nail gun,
The Olympian paraplegic athlete Oscar Pistorious managed to murder his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp using hollow point rounds.
Speculation at the trial from experts was that just the one hit, to her forearm, was sufficient for her to bleed out and die within minutes.
Of course there were a number of other hits, so she died fairly immediately.
Location, location, location
Another unrealistic aspects of getting stabbed in the lack of blood everywhere.
When I was working campus security as a student, there was a suicide attempt at night in the biology building and while the campus police did all the work, I had to go to open the building and lab. The grad student has slit her wrist and her friend had come and helped her, called 911, took her down the hall and got a drink of water, walked her back to a place where they could sit down, etc.
There was trails of blood everywhere, and a lot of their actions were after the bleeding had mostly been contained. With both students having bloody hands and their shoes tracking blood, everywhere they went and anything they touched was covered with blood.
Slitting a wrist produces very conspicuous external bleeding, though. Many types of stabbing injuries produce much less of it, while internal bleeding may be severe at the same time.
So it seems that it breaks down like this (feel free to correct me):
- If you’re hit in the head, and the bullet or knife destroys vital CNS tissue, it’s nearly immediate.
- If you’re shot/stabbed and a major blood vessel (artery?) is injured/destroyed, then you’ll lose consciousness quickly due to the drop in blood pressure, but you won’t die from blood loss for several more minutes.
- If you avoid major CNS injury and major blood loss, you’re not likely to die quickly- at that point, it’s stuff like slow blood loss, infection, loss of organ function, dehydration, etc… that’ll kill you.
That’s why in general, bigger bullets that penetrate deeper are more effective for law enforcement/self-defense use- they’re more likely to penetrate deeply and make a bigger hole, which increases the chance of damaging something causing massive blood loss and the subsequent loss of consciousness.
Kind of the opposite - particularly with regards to law enforcement the concern is for the bullet to stop penetrating and either mushroom or tumble, causing a catastrophic wound cavity without exiting the body of the person being shot. That’s why hollow points are preferred in law enforcement, as a bullet that doesn’t come to a stop inside the body is going to keep travelling and present a danger of hitting someone else. The kind of wounds caused by through and throughs are also typically very small compared to the mess left by a hollow point or a bullet that has tumbled, where there is a massive wound cavity but there is no exit wound; the entire energy of the bullet is expended inside the body.
On the battlefield, this is actually specifically prohibited by the Hague Convention of 1899 Declaration (IV,3) concerning Expanding Bullets
The Contracting Parties agree to abstain from the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body, such as bullets with a hard envelope which does not entirely cover the core or is pierced with incisions.
which was written up in response to what were then called dumdum bullets. Modern small arms bullets are in fact designed specifically to tumble while not being hollow pointed or having ‘a hard envelope which does not entirely cover the core’ so they achieve the same practical effect while avoiding directly violating the Hague Convention, undercutting it in spirit while adhering to in the letter.
Since the beginning of the era of photography it has been relatively rare to film someone as they died. It’s happened but infrequently. We now live in a time when you can easily see video of hundreds if not more people dying by various means with a couple of strokes of a keyboard. One thing that is common is it never looks like it does in the movies.