Pistol round to the chest. Lethal or no? (a la Punisher et. al.)

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Phantom Warrior

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WARNING!!!!! SOME MINOR SPOILERS!!! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK...

In the last two nights I saw "Man on Fire" and "Punisher." Both decent movies. Basically revenge oriented, w/ a running battle to come up w/ creative ways to kill someone. Dakota Fanning does an AMAZING job in "Man on Fire." Too bad she's like 7.

But I digress. In "Man on Fire" Denzel Washington's character takes several rounds to the chest and passes out, but survives. This occurs while he is dispatching four attackers w/ a Glock 17 (loaded w/ ball ammo, interstingly enough) by shooting them in, you guessed it, the chest. Later he is shot twice in the chest AGAIN and walks around for 2+ hours without medical aid before he finally dies. In "Punisher" Thomas Jane's character takes a shot from what looks like a SIG 220 and basically sits there and looks pissed. He then gets blown into the water by an explosion and floats there until a friendly guy takes him on a boat ride and patches him up. All this with one of the famous .45ACP rounds resting in his chest. Of course later on in the movie his heavily modified Colts (what does boring the chambers out mean anyway?) have no problem dropping BGs with chest shots.

So, here's my question. I know this is Hollywood, but is a chest wound lethal or no? This seems like a pretty bad double standard. Can you come up with a reasonable explanation?
 
Come on ---- give that some serious thought -- two maybe three minutes of cerebral work and let us know what you come up with --- I bet your answer will be very similar to what everyone else says. You've already sort of answered it. Say it with me ---- HOL-LY-WOOD!!! If someone shoots you in the chest -- you might die. Or --- you might get lucky. Or -- you might walk around for a while and THEN die - or you might make it to medical attention where they will patch you up and you might be as good as new -- or they'll patch you up but you might suffer paralysis or the loss of a lung or permanent nerve damage. Or maybe they'll patch you up but a day later while lying in recovery you'll throw a clot and begin bleeding internally which might lead to a heart attack or stroke and THEN you might die. So a pistol shot to the chest MIGHT be fatal ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- or not.
 
You mean

Denzel Snipes or Wesley Washington?:neener:

Very,very few movies portray anything accurately especially gunfights.
 
Some people get hit and die. Some people get hit and have to be told about it, then die of fright. Some people walk to the ambulance, and chat with the medical staff while being patched up under local.


Your mileage may vary. The only thing that is CERTAIN is, nobody is going to be flung backwards by a hit from a .44 magnum, or any other handgun.


So, yes, I have no problem believing that someone could get hit like these movie idiots and do what they did. Contrary to popular myth, headshots aren't even a guaranteed death sentence.
 
It is indeed a movie, so "suspension of disbelief" kicks in. Without that little piece of psychobabble, we woudn't be able enjoy any book/play/movie/TV show except factual ones about factual events.

Having said that, I recall seeing from some official bureau some years ago statistics stating that 70% of handgun shooting victims survive. The interesting thing was that it was reversed for shotgun/rifle shooting victims; 70% of them die.
 
Quartus is right.

Basically, a person can potentially withstand several shots to the chest and survive. It has happened in real life. People have withstood one or more shots to the head as well and survived. How is this possible?

Simple. The external location of entry does not necessarily determine what injuries occur inside. Chest shots can miss vital organs via random chance or by being deflected via impacting ribs, sternum, or vertebral column. In some cases, bullets may lodge in the ribs, sternum or vertebral column before penetrating.

For head shots, we often assume them to be lethal. "Head" shot is really improper terminology. The 'head' shot really needs to be a brain, brain stem, or spinal chord shot that produces significant damage to those structures. Many failures to stop with head shots are the result of shooting the facial area without penetrating into the brain. Others penetrate but either bisect the two hemispheres or manage to skate around the interior of the skull along the lining between the brain and the skull. Still others actually hit the brain case and then fail to penetrate even though the skull is opened up.

Hollywood may present some unrealistic events, but seemingly unrealistic events have happened in the real world as well. Take for example the guy on The Learning Channel's emergency room program where the doctors are looking at an x-ray of a guy with a BIG knife driven into his brain from the top down. Another doc walks in and comments on the x-ray and asked something like if the guy died immediately or not...apparently trying to figure out why they x-rayed a dead man. The other docs comment in a somewhat jovial manner that the guy is very much alive and that the doc and chat with him about the knife. He doc was in disbelief. How do you just chat with a guy with a big knife handle protruding from the top of his head? In short, the knife penetrated from the top-down, about 3-4" or so. It bisecting the hemispheres. The course of action was simply to remove the knife in the opposite direction of entry. The man suffered no brain damage and had a full recovery.
 
on the topic of gun shots, where generally would be the least painful to get shot?


also, if you have seen reservior dogs, is the stuff mr orange says about getting shot in the stomach true?
 
I see Inmates on a daily basis with healed wounds from bullets. Most show no long term effects from the shooting other than the scars. Some however are confined to wheel chairs or tote around colostomy bags. Talked to one last night that had a steel rod permanently attatched to the bone in his right leg due to a 9mm FMJ shattering the leg bone.

You might live from a chest shot...you might not. It all depends on when it's your time to go. The grim reaper is kinda picky these days.

Of course in a movie the good guy can't die until he saves everyone. :D
on the topic of gun shots, where generally would be the least painful to get shot?
Click to expand...

In the hair. For those of use suffering male pattern baldness it would be a clean miss!

Good Shooting
Red
 
real wounds vs. hollywood wounds...

I've studied some actual firearm inflicted chest wounds in magazines such as Soldier of fortune and the New England Journal of Medicine...
Also seen the physical evidence of two separate season's deer that were dead before they knew what hit them and still managed to run a few hundred yards before dropping... Pierced the heart on one and both lungs on the other, and both with more powerful weapons!!!
Technically speaking, Hollywood has no clue what a firearm can or can't do and it's very seldom that an entire gunflick can run it's course without at least 5 glaring atrocities happening... double barreld shotguns with three round magazines, a Colt .44 Peacemaker with seven shots, a 9mm JHP spark as it strikes the fiberglass hood of a Corvette, the guy who emptied a 30 round mag from an AK-47 and not 2 seconds later you see him holding the barrel... ANY of you who have fired even 5 rounds from an AK know that you can cook eggs on that barrel within the first three shots.
I always have issue with the guy who takes a round to his left breast area and just kinda shrugs it off by saying it passed clean though, THROUGH WHAT? his heart, lung, at the very least the aorta, one of the largest veins in the human body is right there!!! But at least he can bleed and look cool with his arm hanging limp while still pulling off John Wayne marksmanship...
Anything 9mm and smaller, from a distance exceeding 15 feet, striking a 6 foot, 200 lb. man, who is mad enough at you to warrant you shooting him, and wearing a heavy leather coat has been known to not penetrate the leather coat... I know a retired local police officer who is only able to repeat the story because the bad guy's bullet missed his head by mere inches and the cop's second round hit the guy in the throat, killing him instantly.
It was back in the late 70's and it was found out later that the guy was a drifter who was passing through town, a crank addict, and he was robbing an area bussiness at 3 a.m. when startled by the officer.
Once you go to .357 magnum and higher, it's all a moot point.
Even if you are wearing ballistic protection, unless it's the no-man-down body armor deployed by the LAPD SWAT teams, you're going to the hospital fast with bruised ribs and a nasty pressure wound at the very least... However, there are a few times hollywood gets it right, the gut-shot thing in resevoir dogs for example....
jim
 
"but is a chest wound lethal or no?"

Almost certainly. The question is, when ?
IMO, based on not a whole lot, a GSW to the chest will most likely be lethal without medical treatment although I am sure that sometime, somewhere, someone survived one without medical treatment.
Will a GSW to the chest with a handgun result in someone dying instantly ? No. There are a couple reasons why someone would die from a GSW to the chest and they all take a few mintues to kill them.
Will a GSW to the chest cause someone to immediately become unconscious ? No. Unconscioiusness in this case would be caused by the brain not getting enough oxygen. This is going to take a little time.
Of course, like I mentioned above, there are always exceptions to everything and I am sure that at some time anything has happened.

My movie faviorites include the one already mentioned: "it went clean through" or "it went in and out": like that is good.
Others include the WWII movies where the first and most important thing is to get sulfa on the wound. They frantically tear open a packet with their teeth and pour this powder onto the wound. Like infection is the thing you would be most worried about after getting shot in the chest with a rifle.
Then there are the people who instantly drop over dead when they are stabbed.
Finally, the idea that the bullet in your body is what will kill you. If you remove the bullet, everything will be OK.
 
John Farnam tells the story of a new emergency room doctor who is asked to do some work on a ganger, who had a sucking chest wound from a drive by shooting. To treat that, they need to close the hole, then punch a new, clean hole in the chest wall (excuse me, "make an incision"), and vacuum out the air to re-inflate the lung. The new doctor asked where he should make the new hole. The experienced doctor glanced at the patient (who was conscious and wise-cracking), and said, "Oh, just put it right under the other five old incisions."

The kid was on his SIXTH sucking chest wound.



I saw the result - close up - of the first ever drive-by shooting in Buena Park, California. (I called it in, in fact.) One dead on the spot from a .22 in the head, 50 steps from my front door. The other kid ran over to our side of the street to hide. (No exterior lights - lots of cover.) He took it through the left chest area. Never passed out. Next day I heard he was fine.

That was on Sunday night. On Saturday my new bride and I moved. :what:
 
I had a crusty old WW-II vet tell me that nobody he ever shot with his 1911 ever got up again, in a little more colorful and derogatory language, of course.
 
There was a SD shooting that somebody on here posted. He said he shot the bg with a .45 in the chest and arm.


The BG lived.


let me try to find it.
 
During the bungled Northfield bank robbery, Cole Younger took fourteen (14) bullets. The extra lead he was toting around didn't seem to keep him from avoiding the law for two weeks before getting caught and going to the pen.

When he died peaceably in bed many, many years later, he was found to still have all 14 rounds still lodged in his carcass.

Now, I'm not sure where each of the 14 round went, but I'd guess at least one of them was a chest shot. And, since this was 1876, I'm sure more than a couple of the 14 were fairly large diametre bullets.

LawDog
 
As those medic/EMT experience can attest, rifle bullets tend to do more damage than pistol bullets. The energy that rifle rounds generate is a secondary wounding mechanism; it causes tissue to tear, cell walls to rupture, etc. Now, human tissue is elastic, so when stretched (the temporary wound cavity)it bounces back. But it won't necessarily bounce back to exactly the way it was (which is why permanent wound cavities are usually bigger than a simple caliber-sized corridor, even if the rifle bullet doesn't expand, fragment, or any of that high-speed stuff). (Sort of like the splash you get when you throw a rock into a lake. Even though rifle bullets are aerodynamic and can slip through the air with ease, human tissue is significantly denser than air and they cannot pass though a human body without making a splash, so to speak.)

Handgun rounds, with a few exceptions (magnum hot-loads that have rifle level energies, like .454 Casull, .500 S&W, etc.), don't have enough energy to do this sort of damage. It's there, of course, but to a much smaller extent.

So, unless the bullet goes through something important, it's not going to kill someone (at least not until they bleed out). I imagine that sometimes, people drop instantly dead when shot, but it's probably uncommon with handgun wounds. (There are exceptions, though; sometimes people are dead right there.)

In truth, there are so many variables involved that it's impossible to predict whether a not a shot that penetrates at an outside location on a human body will be lethal or not, or whether or not the victim will be instantly incapacitated.

From what I've read, sometimes you'll meet guys that will take ten rounds and live to tell about it. Other times you'll shoot a guy once through the sternum and he's dead before he hits the floor.

*shrug*

I agree with 444...a lot of times they say "it went clean though" like that's somehow preferable. You hear that on gun boards too; "overpenetration". At least in combat, there's no such thing as overpenetration.

Having a hole clean through you and a large exit wound to bleed out of, to my mind, aren't preferable to a bullet that stops in your body.
 
Going back to the 'even head shots don't mean they're dead' topic, I shot a deer in the head with a .270 and Hornady SST's this past year. It dropped instantly. After it got dark, I got the truck to pick it up, and couldn't find it. Huge puddle of blood and blood trail leading off. After tracking him over half a mile, I heard it up ahead and managed to catch up with it and put it down with a .357. I had hit it in the center of the head, just under the ear, and he was still up and running. The initial impact had only knocked him out. Food for thought.
 
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