I’m wondering what it feels like to get shot and I’m not curious enough to try it.
I understand that the effect will vary depending on circumstances, weapons and people. However, any data concerning what it feels like would be welcome.
I am putting this in the GQ section because it’s more about gathering data points than having a lot of people share their personal experiences, although that would be welcome too.
I have never been, personally, shot. I’ve known many MANY people who have. While there are few outliers that didn’t seem to be phased by it, the general consensus seems to be that it hurts, a lot.
Funny—I was just thinking about this the other day. One thing that occurred to me is that a bullet, if it comes to rest inside the body, must be hotter than hell. Anybody who’s ever fired a gun knows that the barrel is sizzling hot to the touch after just a few rounds are fired. Even if the bullet were heated to just the boiling point of water, it would be an excruciatingly painful thing to have inside your body.
Not really. A bullet doesn’t have a lot of mass, lead doesn’t have a very high heat capacity, and the body contains a lot of water. As soon as the bullet enters the body, it’s going to cool to body temperature. It’s not even going to burn the skin.
You can try this yourself if you want to. Take a bullet and boil it. Put a few drops of spit in the palm of your hand, and place the bullet into the spit. It will feel warm, but it won’t burn at all. The amount of heat that 100oC lead can hold is just too small to have any effect on a comparable mass of water.
Not shooting, but I always remember a comment made in a British TV documentary many years ago about descriptions of pain. The subject was “stabbing pain.” The question was - so we all talk about a stabbing pain, but what does being stabbed really feel like? So they interviewed a policeman who had been stabbed. He answer was that it felt like being hit with a cricket bat (a baseball bat would be a close approximation.) Which was both interesting and amusing. Amusing because I doubt he had every been hit with a cricket bat - and thus it was still a second hand description of the pain.
Never been shot, but an aquaintence described it like being hit with a hammer.
Thanks for the datum. It’s true that the energy involved is much the same.
Taking Francis’ comment into account, do you know if he’d ever been hit with a hammer?
Probably not in the same place, but if you’ve ever hit your thumb with a hammer (I have, hard enough to tear off the finger nail and make the tip of my thumb look like ground beef) you can probably extrapolate reasonably.
Data points can be gathered better in IMHO. Moved from General Questions.
samclem, moderator
That’s interesting. I’m sure I’ve read descriptions of being shot which mention the burning pain from the heat of the bullet, but they may have been fictional.
When I was a kid, I asked my grandfather if it hurt to be shot. He looked at me like I was crazy and said of course, it hurts. My only experience had been watching westerns where the hero gets shot in the arm (always the arm), and he merely grabs it and grimaces. Didn’t seem to slow him down at all.
Actually, it is more like being hit by a hammer that is driving a railroad spike into your body. After that is the throbbing, which starts at the wound site but rapidly grows to include your entire body and doesn’t go away for days.
The “flesh wound” of t.v. and film is a pure creation of Hollywood. Even truly being just “winged” (i.e. a surface wound on a limb that doesn’t damage nervous or connective tissue) basically rips a wound channel the diameter of the bullet right through the meat of the muscle with all of the attentant trauma to nearby tissue. You may still be able to use that arm, but it will be bleeding like a popped tick and won’t have good motor control until the swelling and throbbing goes down. And forget about just slapping a bandage on it; you need to thoroughly clean out the wound channel of all residue such as threads from fabric or any surface dirt so as to avoid infection that can become systemic or contamination that will prevent healing.
One common trope is being shot in the shoulder, which seems to have little effect in film. In reality, the shoulder area is so jam packed with bones, nerves, connective tissue, endocrine tissue, et cetera and so constantly in use even if you immobilize the arm that there is virtually no way to come out of a significant shoulder wound without some loss of capability.
Stranger
Huh. I talked to two veterans about this (among other things) years ago, and they both said that bullets burned like hell when they were inside you. One was in Grenada, and the other was in the first Iraq war. One of them described being shot like being hit with a cue stick used by an olympic weightlifter, and the other said it was like being hit by a line drive.
The impact and intrustion may feel hot, but Blake is correct that a bullet just doesn’t have enough heat capacity to actually sear flesh.
There are incindiary rounds which contain some flammible compound (typically phosphorus or barium and some metallic salts) which are used for tracing or in anti-aircraft applications to set fuel alight but the amount of damage done to personnel is dwarfed by the kinetic damage of the bullet.
Stranger
Stranger (and others who may know about this),
What effect does kinetic energy actually have? In what way does a small piece of metal with 1200 foots-pounds of kinetic energy impacting a meat sack affect said meat sack? I get that, ceteris paribus, more kinetic energy means more of one’s shit being fucked up, but even if I know the formula to calculate it by heart, I don’t know enough about physics to understand what kinetic energy entails.
Shrug, I’m just repeating what they said. And a bullet doesn’t have to be searing to feel hot, especially if it’s stuck somewhere sensitive.
Below a certain threshold (generally handgun bullets and slower) it’s not a huge factor, and bullet diameter and design is a bigger deal, because the temporary cavities and stretching caused by these lower speed bullets is within the elastic capacity of most tissues so as to not cause damage beyond the actual hole itself.
Faster rounds like those fired by rifles however, do quite a bit of damage because their temporary cavity stretching is beyond the capability of the tissue to stretch, and subsequent tearing and damage occurs. That’s why a 60 grain 5.56 mm round from a M4 carbine going upwards of 3000 fps is quite a bit more deadly than a 147 grain 9mm bullet going 900 fps.
Hydrostatic shock is an irregular phenomenon, especially in human or large game sized targets, and should not be relied upon for lethality.
For what it is worth, I’ve never heard of a credible forensics study or journal article on terminal ballistics that described an organ literally exploding from the passage of a bullet, though their are many instances of an organ being virtually shredded by a fragmented bullet. However, the tradeoff is that a fragmented round typically doesn’t penetrate as deeply as a round that remains intact, hence why many newer hollowpoint bullet designs focus on controlled expansion and remaining intact. Never mind what you may hear or read about the “buzzsaw” effect of such rounds; you can see by photos of such rounds into ballistic gelatin that even after ~14 inches of penetration they’ve turned 1.5 to 2 turns, with a final diameter roughly twice the original size; again, increasing the permanent wound channel size but more importantly limiting overpenetration.
As for kinetic energy, there really is no good relationship between that and lethality; the 9mmP and the .45 ACP have dramatically different kinetic energies (115 gr versud 230 gr) but essentially the same empirical “one shot stop” percentage (within any reasonable bounds of error). However, momentum times sectional density gives a reasonably good correlation to penetration (not accouting for the effects of bullet expansion or tumbling) which does correspond well with terminal ballistics, e.g. how effectively the bullet delivers what energy it has at sufficient depth to disrupt organ functions. The design of the bullet, however, is also critical; a non-expanding bullet may punch through and through, doing relatively little damage (and posing a hazard to the background) while an expanding bullet may deliver its energy within the target and remain within the body.
Stranger
Might need some math help here but I might be able to shed some light on the damage caused by my main pistol rounds
.40 cal Federal Premium Hydra shok, this is a split 6x copper jacket lead slug with an expansion pin. It is supposed to expand to appx twice its size in a soft target 180 grain charge
@muzzle 990 fps/390ft lbs
@25yds. 960fps/365ft lds
@50yds. 930fps/345ft lbs
So you have a hot object a little less than one inch around hitting you with between 300 and 400 ft lbs of energy that has to hurt. Anybody able to quantify that?
Thanks
Capt
They have dramatically different momenta but similar amount of kinetic energy.
What I assume are typical loads:
9mm: 115 gr X 1300 ft/s X 1300 ft/s = 420 ft-lbf
.45: 230 gr X 900 ft/s X 900 ft/s= 414 ft-lbf.
Except for that 185 gr Bonded Defense .45 round which is in the low 600s, both 9mm Parabellum and .45ACP range from the mid 300s ft-lbf. to the 500s.
So I guess that can be evidence that kinetic energy is the chief factor of effectiveness after hit location.