I don’t have firsthand experiences of how lethal guns could be (depsite a two months stint in the military). I am in the process of preparing a modern pen and paper role-playing game and finds it strange that characters can suffer multiple gunshot wounds without dying…
Just how lethal are bullets are? Does a single hit to the chest or torso confirms death, or at least, rendering a person helpless? I know at point-blank range the damage would be tremendous. How about at around 200 metres?
Then there accounts of people who has manages to fight on despite multiple gunshot wounds. A case that was cited was that of the rapper Tupac Shakur.
So I am totally puzzled. Often in movies guns are often protrayed as weapon of instant death. You got hit, you are down (unless you happen to be hearthrob hero). I knew of friends in military who assure me that if they are shot they defintely will be down.
This opens a large argument. In games characters can take multiple hits and keep going over time because reality makes a poor game.
Some animals take a shot and keep moving (like a deer). Some animals (like us) take a hit and go down.We do not have to, a single hit need not kill, but the vast majority of people when hit go down.
Hits to the chest cavity are incapacitating to say the least. Some survive, but few, fewer still keep operating. Most soldiers when hit go down and tend to the wound and are somewhat happy to get to the rear. Noting takes the will to die out of you quite so fast as being almost killed.
The real trick, you see is in getting a hit. People are small and the move fast, or better yet move very little when being hunted. Another reason reality makes a poor game is that real combat goes very slowly. Nobody is in hurry to get killed.
Of course much of this goes out the window when dealing with criminal activity. At least some crooks got nothing to loose. Some are crazed on any three random letters of the alphabet.
Hope that helps, but you may expect a lot of replies to this one.
This question is a big, fat can of worms that may well end up in Great Debates. For what it’s worth, I’ll chuck in my 2 cents.
First thing you’ve got to do is consider the differences between handgun bullet wounds, and rifle bullet wounds.
Handgun bullets are considerably slower, and are less likely to fragment than rifle bullets. They also create a much smaller “temporary cavity” which is pretty much incapable of causing additional damage. Some handgun bullets like the glaser are deliberately designed to fragment which could make them more effective against some people, but the low momentum of the fragments restricts their penetration. A 9mm Parabellum FMJ will go clean through a person’s arm, their torso and out the other side, a 9mm Parabellum glaser might be stopped by their arm.
Rifle bullets go a lot faster than handgun bullets, and many of them have a high chance of fragmenting within a body. They lose power with distance though, so a 5.56mm from an M16 at 100 yards may make a very nasty wound whereas the same round at 500 yards may punch an uncomplicated hole. Which can still kill you if it’s in the right place, or be relatively trivial if it isn’t.
Consider this. Now you have more questions to ask: rifle? randgun? full metal jacket? hollow point? jacketed hollowpoint? frangible round? (nasty) callibre? powder load/velocity? smooth or rifled bore?
Start by ignoring nearly everything you see in movies as extremely few portray use and effect of firearms with any degree of accuracy.
The question is one people make careers of trying to answer. Probably best to start with kinetic energy (velocity squared times mass of projectile) but there isn’t complete consensus of that some claim that momentum (maxx times velocity) is more important regarding incapacitation, particularly with handguns. Anyway, if you start with KE it gives a measure of how much energy is available to the target then the question of how it delivers that energy.
Ouch, that was complicated. But it would be safe to say just because someone is hit by a bullet doesn’t meant that he is a definte goner? Also, am I right in saying that whether someone can still fight on after sustaining a bullet wound depends on 1) where he is hit and 2) the extent he can endure pain?
Wounds that shatter bones tend to be very debilitating i.e. you can’t walk with a shattered femur. That has nothing to do with pain tolerance, will to survive, etc. There is also sometimes bonus damage from bone fragments acting as secondary projectiles.
Wounds that disrupt the CNS tend to end the fight immediately. A shot that penetrates the skull and traumatizes the brain or a shot that severs the spinal cord (the closer to the skull the better) also aren’t things that can be overcome by force of will.
I’ve been a hunter since 1974. I’ve seen a good many animals take hits from high powered rifles through the heart, lungs, or guts and then run for surprising distances (sometimes miles) before bleeding out. I’ve never seen one move even a step after a shot through the brain or cervical vertebrae.
You think that was complicated? I’d hardly started! But yes, you’re broadly right on both counts. You should note that with a lot of adrenalin, some very painful injuries can go un-noticed, and being shot at is presumably a high-adrenalin experience.
You can get lucky. Sometimes a bullet will poke a straight uncomplicated hole through a person, which requires minimal medical treatment. Handgun bullets are most likely to do this, or rifle bullets at long range when they’ve spent much of their speed. Close range rifle bullets, especially bullets prone to fragmenting, are very likely to inflict a nasty, nasty wound wherever they hit.
If it only passes through muscle and manages to avoid hitting arteries, veins, bones, tendons or nerves, you have your classic “flesh wound”. Someone highly adrenalised, on drugs or sufficiently heroic may well run around ignoring it for several hours. This is unlikely, but okay for game purposes. At the other extreme, physiological “instant kills” are basically when a bullet hits brain or severs the spinal cord up high, and they’re not that common either.
Most gun injuries are not instantly fatal, especially handgun injuries. Physiological incapacitation tends to come from blood loss, which may take seconds to minutes even if the bullet has cut an artery or pierced an internal organ. Instant psychological incapacitation is common however, just as stubbing your bare toe really hard may cause you to drop and scream for a bit.
Not even rules of thumb, but possible rules of game. Five catagories of bullet effect can be:
a) “Flesh wound” - players and bad guys can shrug them off and stitch themselves up later. Should have to roll not to wuss out and adopt fetal position on the floor while wailing for parents.
b) “Minor injury” - player gets a limp, has to stagger around, leaves blood trail. Can function at a penalty for hours or days. Not wussing out when shot is more difficult. Will need to visit a hospital at some point.
c) “Major injury” - loss of use of a limb, coughs blood, can’t stand unsupported. Not wussing out is very difficult. Can function at a penalty for hours, but increasing chance of major injury turning to critical injury with time.
d) “Critical injury” - hole in artery, kidney, liver, sucking wound etc. Player can function at a penalty for up to 30 seconds. Not wussing out almost impossible. Assuming they don’t wuss out, their main concern should be tying off whatever is jetting scarlet before they lose conciousness, which they certainly will. Will probably die without rapid medical attention, may even die with it.
Well, to answer my own question above, bullet punch holes in people. However, it matter how far away the person is, and where they are hit. Sure, so the above posters already made the same point, but not in two sentences.
Oddly enough some of the smaller caliber bullets (like .22’s) tend to be the most lethal.
Once entering the body they tend to corkscrew and loop and, depending on the energy left in the projectile, they ricochet off of bones inside the body causing even more internal damage. In the end the internal shreading claims the victim.
Larger caliber bullets when they hit bone cause a massive shock (for lack of a better term) to go through the entire body. Especially hits to the chest. As I heard it put, “It puts a shake in their frame.” Most people tend to drop like a sack of bricks when this happens.
And no… you don’t go flying across the room when hit.
Destructive, you mean. NATO loves the 5.56 at high velocity because it acts this way and ties up medical resources & turns combat personnel into medics rather than combatants. Because we hope the bad guys will try & help their wounded.
The .44 magnum, on the other hand, was in fact designed to knock down & dismember charging, drug-enraged, machette-wielding peasants who had proven much less vulnerable to standard small arms fire.
Bullet design and metallurgy plays just as big a part as caliber, mass, and velocity. “One shot stops” are the holy grail of law enforcement pistol cartridge manufacturers. The general definition of a “one shot stop” is a hit from a single round that prevents the victim from taking additional offensive action, not necessarily a lethal hit. Modern thinking about the major combat/LE calibers (9mm Parabellum, 10mm Norma, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP) is that the right bullet and powder load in any of these cartridges can achieve 90+% performance. Glaser Safety Slugs in 9mm Kurz (aka .380 ACP), and other, less powerful chamberings, have achieved near-legendary performance along with their bigger brothers.
There are many factors to consider when quantifying the lethality of firearms, Hollywood be damned.
First and foremost guns are merely a device. Left to themselves they are perfectly harmless.
It is the person(s) who leaves a loaded gun to fall into the hands of a person/child untrained in gun safety or who has inadequate training in gun handling that causes the problem(s)
Any/every time you pick up a gun hold it so that your finger is NOT in the trigger area.
Remove the clip. Open the action to remove a potential cartridge from the chamber. Or in the case of a revolver release the cylinder, swing it out and remove any cartridges.
Guns are like automobiles. It is the nut that holds the wheel …
Arrows punch holes in people too (or is it pierce?) And it is kind of strange that most D&D enthusiast has no problem with adventurers being poked full of arrows without dying, but has trouble accepting that a person can withstand multiple bullets.
When does the range begins to matter? I know for the M-16 it is about 200m (sorry, I’m from a Commonwealth country…).
Let add another equation to this whole mess. How about body armour? AFAIK, there seems to be two effects - one is to deflect bullets, and the another is to soften impact. Does armour actually do anything against bullet? If they manage to stop a bullet, does it still hurt?
Body armor can (and does) stop bullets, but transfers the force of impact over a much wider area. (Instead of all that force being at the tippy-tip of the bullet, it is now over a larger area.)
So imagine being hit by a fastball. (A professionally-thrown pitch or an average sandlot pitch? I have no idea.) In any case, it scares the living snot out of you. You feel it. You may even be knocked down. Other people might feel the impact and keep fighting in a state of rage. Hard to predict.
Hey, I don’t mean to rain on the weapons parade but a few of you hit the nail on the head.
Handguns, while neat and cool for videogames and what not, were designed with one purpose in mind. Killin’ folks. So please keep that in mind when you’re watching TV or playing a video game.
That piece of metal you are looking at is NOT a toy. It’s an invention that has changed the history of our planet, for better or for worst, and has taken more lives in the real world than you can comprehend. Be safe around 'em in real life.
rotordog steps down from the soapbox and returns everyone to the regularly scheduled program
I don’t have the reference material, anymore, but what I recall about a not too recent FBI financed study of single shot bullet wounds showed that instant fatality varied far more with round placement than with type of weapon, type of bullet, distance, etc.
Bullet wounds to the brain, upper spinal cord, and the heart are instantly fatal, in most cases, and instantly incapacitating in all cases. Twenty two, or Forty four, if you hit him between the eyes, he dies. Once you get out into the body periphery, big rounds, and high impact velocities matter more. Solid metal jacketed rounds are more likely to cause eventually fatal injuries, unless medical treatment is likely to be delayed for hours. (hard and heavy rounds penetrate flesh and bone deeper, and are more likely to intersect with essential organs.) Glaser in the chest, and you will die, late this week of systemic infection. The same wound with a FMJ will probably penetrate the lung entirely, and you will die of anoxia later tonight.
The most interesting thing discussed in that study was that people who know that they have been shot tend to fall down. Folks who don’t know often don’t fall down, and sometimes continue fighting or fleeing with very serious wounds. The .45 ACP was invented to knock down charging fanatics. It doesn’t do that, though. It does kill them fairly reliably, as they charge. One in the chest will discourage even the most dedicated maniac, and if he expects to die, he will at least slow down enough that you can hit him again.
Now, if I recall correctly, all the cases studied were adults, and the overwhelming majority were male. Most were either policemen, or criminals, and a lot of the criminals were intoxicated. No attempt was made to adjust the data to account for that skewing factor. Since all the data items were actual wounds to the body from single bullets, armor, and multiple hits were not factors.