“I recommend shooting attackers in the head.
I’ve seen too many people put-up a strenuous fight in the ER, long after being shot in the chest!”
Trauma Nurse (and one of my students)
Most of the chest-wounds seen by my nurse/student were, of course, from handgun bullets, and her observations are not atypical.
Handgun bullets usually penetrate into the chest, and when they subsequently compromise the circulatory system, particularly the “supply-side,” blood-pressure will drop (rapidly or slowly) and consciousness will be thus compromised- at some point.
So, a person thus shot will remain fully conscious for at least five seconds, but more likely twenty or thirty seconds. And in some cases, consciousness comes and goes over a period of an hour or more, as my student has observed, more than once!
An option is to shoot an attacker in the head.
A bullet that punches-through the skull or facial bones and then goes on to penetrate into the cranium will likely deanimate the attacker much faster (and more permanently), but the head represents a significantly more challenging target than the chest, and the skull and facial bones are often not penetrated by pistol bullets. Many times, pistol bullets ricochet off the skull, or embed but fail to penetrate into the braincase.
Naturally, both strategies have their advocates.
When an attacker is shot (single or multiple times, by pistol bullets), he may fall to the deck immediately, but he may shrug-off his wounds, press his attack (displaying very little discomfort), and continue to try to harm you. Both eventualities have surely happened, but neither is likely.
By far, the most likely behavioral change you will notice immediately after shooting an attacker is that he will run away. And from the standpoint of your continued good health, that represents a good outcome!
He may subsequently succumb to his wounds (seconds, hours, or days later). Or, he may recover completely, after first giving doctors and nurses a rough time in the ER, as noted above. You will have little control over any of that.
The conclusion here is that the immediate post-shooting behavior of violent felons is highly unpredictable, particularly when handguns are involved. With the preservation of our good health our primary goal, we thus need to train to fire our pistols with precision, and multiple times when necessary.
Even then, we need to be careful never to count-on any particular immediate result.
As I’ve often repeated, when we find ourselves in a life-threatening circumstance, we first need to ask ourselves one question:
“What can I do to keep myself from getting hurt?”
That will drive the rest of our decisions!
/John
