Okay, you’ve been warned! This ain’t for the squeamish.
I read in the news just now about this fan who died by being shot in the eye with a pepper-spray pellet. Now my question: if you are shot with a low-caliber handgun- say, a .22- could you survive, if only for a minute, being shot in both eyes?
I’ve seen video and know of several cases of people surviving being shot in the face or head. If it’s with a low-caliber handgun- which is what I want to restrict this discussion to, not high-powered handguns or rifles- it is entirely possible. But my question requires said guy to be shot in both eyes :eek: ! Then I guess the bullets would have to not hit the brain, or not fatally, etc. Then said guy continues stumbling, blind, able to talk, think, etc.
Why do I ask? B/c I’m very disturbed? No- it’s for a student film. :smack: :smack: :smack: Please don’t hate me- I’m just trying to see how realistic this one part will be!
The brain is right behind the eye so I find that very hard to believe. Perhaps there’s a one-in-a-hundred chance of it somehow ricochet off the skull at the edge of the eye, and thus not entering the brain and instead heading for the neck or something… but sounds like some nasty odds.
If you take a look at the skull you’ll see that they eye sockets are backed by a considerable amount of bone. Although fairly thin, it could be suffient to deflect or stop a low-powered round. Indeed, even if the bullet penetrates the cranium and enters the brain there is no guarantee of immediate or even eventual death, unless it strkes the hindbrain or the brain stem. The literature is rife with people who have taken shrapnel wounds or even direct hits to the brain from large caliber handguns and suffered no permenant damage, or strange but non-terminal neurological disfunction.
To answer the OP, yes, this could potentially happen. The victim could in fact survive indefinitely. But…egh!
Oh, and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an eye injury, but they are predictably gross. I’m not generally squeamish, but Donnie Darko made me squirm with it’s depiction of an eye wound.
I thought this was going about the ‘gristle gun’ in the movie Existenz… Yum!
Don’t know what scene you have in mind, but if your objective is to have the character blinded by a gunshot, a better option might be to have them hit by flying shards of glass or pieces of brick.
I’m not sure exactly what your requirements are, but have you considered an injury where the bullet passes in front of the face at close range, so the exiting gas/powder blinds the victim without actually being shot?
It’s cool the way our collective movie consciousnesses are working right now!
You were referring to ‘The Killer’, right? I already thought of that in terms of my movie. And when the other posters referred to glass in the eyes, I thought of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. I also had the original ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (1930) in mind (a kid is blinded by shrapnel), ‘Reservoir Dogs’ (Brown is shot in the forehead, and the blood drips into his eyes), and ‘Halloween 2’ in mind; in the last one, Michael is shot in the eyes directly. I didn’t draw from that exactly when I wrote my script, b/c that would be dumb- he wasn’t human, after all!
I knew when I wrote it that it was really unrealistic and really grotesque, but also that it had a visual and a shock factor to it that really hits hard! Don’t worry, people will be warned about this movie before hand- I am not kidding. This is not something I think most movies could ever do. But it’s great being able to do it now w/o having to worry about ratings or money!
To go even further than that, we were taught in a college psychology class that, so long as the hindbrain or brain stem wasn’t hit, that a person was more likely to suffer permanent impairment from blunt trauma to the head than from a gunshot or other open wound to the brain. A bullet will destroy any brain matter in its direct path, of course, but will leave the surrounding material relatively intact, allowing the brain to reroute around the damaged sections, but blunt trauma will send shockwaves through the brain, causing minor damage to all of the brain tissue, which can’t be rerouted.
Generally, if you hit the skull with two .22 rounds at close range, the victim has a chance, but not that much. If the bullets enter the brain without hitting the skull (i don’t rememember if that hole where the optical nerve passes is big enough for a .22) your chances are significantly improved since the energy is absorbed slowly destroying a small fraction of the brain as opposed to concussive trauma from a skull collision that can damage upto 95% of the brain.
Fair Warning: I am not a forensic pathologist, nor a ballistics expert, so the following may just be a reiteration of an urban legend but:
There appears to be some respect, amongst those who know, for head shots made with .22s because of the tendency for the little bullets to bounce around up there (not having enough power to punch through two layers of skull). One tunnel bored into brain tissue is bad enough but having a couple more because the damn thing bounces would really suck.
If at the right angle a person should be able to survive being shot in the eye. For example through the nose, through the eye and out the side of the head. I would caution against using this in a movie though becuase its really not believible.
This would be true with any low-power handgun round, like a .25ACP/6.35mm or a .32ACP/7.65mm as well. (The .25ACP actually has a lower muzzle energy than a .22LR out of the same length barrel, IIRC.) The disadvantage of using such a low-power round is that it probably won’t penetrate the skull even once unless the shot is properly placed (i.e. through the mouth, behind the ear, or at the base of the skull.) It is frequently found with headshots involving small-caliber pistols that the bullet gets trapped between the skull and the skin and travels around the skull; freaky but true.
The .22 LR is more often used because it is [list=a][li]cheap,[/li][li]easy to build an improvised “zip gun” that chambers it, and,[/li][li]quiet. (Even unsilenced it sounds like a small firecracker a few yards away, and suppressed or with the muzzle pressed up against the body it can sound more like a quiet “pop” than a gunshot.)[/li][/list]
FWIW, the Beretta Bobcat in .22LR with an barrel-integrated suppressor used to be the favored execution weapon of the Israeli Mossad and the Shah-era Iranian SAVAK. I’ve seen a suppressed Ruger Mk II (legal with Class III stamp) that was so quiet you could hear the sound of the striker over the muzzle blast. 'Course, the “can” was about the size of a Pringle’s can.
FAIR WARNING: The page I am about to mention shows severe facial deformities.
If you do a Google search on “midfacial prosthesis” and click on the first hit (domain is dental.columbia.edu), you will see pictures of three people who have been fitted with prostheses to substitute for missing facial features. (None of them are bloody or gory; they’re all healed, but the pictures are somewhat disturbing.) The third one down on the page is a man who sustained a gunshot wound to the face, and pretty much the whole middle of his face is gone – eyes, nose, part of his forehead. Just a big cavity with magnets implanted in the bone to hold the prosthesis.
Eeesh.
(On the other hand, it’s amazing what they can do with prostheses these days.)
Could you possibly get both eyes damaged without extensive brain damage? Probably, from a sideways shot.
Could you survive for a few minutes after being shot in the brain with a 22LR? Certainly. The main damage after all is not the hole, it’s the blood clotting in the brain that occurs in the few minutes afterwards. …You may remember the guy (I think it was in Michigan a few years back) who was sleeping on a couch, and someone shot him in the head with a crossbow, and he survived and recovered. But you see–the important aspect of that injury was that the crossbow bolt filled the hole, preventing much clotting from occurring. And the EMT’s took him to the hospital with the arrow in his head, they sure as heck didn’t pull it out right away.
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“Holes in your head” (penetrating the brain) can, under some circumstances, be 100% survivable and recoverable. For the blotting reason, you’re more likely to survive an arrow than a bullet however.
By the by: from all the times I’ve seen various animals shot with 22LR’s, I don’t buy this “bouncing around inside the head” stuff one bit. 22LR bullets don’t get very far at all inside a body, figure 4-5 inches of solid tissue at most (that is, tissue with no air spaces in it), and getting through a human head-bone would take up most of the momentum a 22LR bullet has to begin with. Yes it would certainly be a fatal injury, for the clotting reason I said above–but I seriously doubt that there would be “a bunch of ricochets” involved.
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First, I would consider the kind of film. ‘Neo’ took a pretty good whack to both eyes with what I can only suspect was a good deal more force than a .22 and lived. But within the context of the movie, given the level of suspention of disbelief, it didn’t matter about the real possibility of survival.
Second, people can and do get shot in the head with small caliber arms and survive. There is the (semi)famous incident of the guy in the early 1900’s (?) who, while blasting, took an iron rod through the head and lived just fine - though it did change his personality. I knew a guy who ran a bait shop that got shot in the left temple with a .22 and only suffered (long term) the loss of control of his middle finger on one hand.
Re: benifits of .22’s for shooting people, it’s not so much the noise of the gas escaping, it’s that it is a sub-sonic round. With a faster round, you can suppress the explosion but not the mini sonic boom. People use (suppressed) .22’s for killing, but they shoot to the back of the brain/skull.
Also, guns introduce hydro-static shock so the damage is not so much from the hole size. That is why the arrow in the head is more survivable even though the hole is about the same size. Leaving the arrow in helps, but it is the lack of the hydro-static shock that is the bigger factor.
AFA movie stuff and angles…the killer could hold two handguns, cross his/her arms and shoot into the eyes and the round would exit out of the side of the orbital sockit possibly missing the brain entirely.
For those too chicken to look at Scarlett67’s link here is a direct picture to the man wearing the prosthesis. The eyes, nose and part of the forehead are fake.
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… back to the mundane world of printer management… 
