— On television, as well as in movies, there seems to be this general idea that if someone is shot in the, or in the leg, then the worst that happens will be that the person will grimace and go on with what he was doing before he was shot. Getting shot in the leg may cause him to hobble around a bit, but no worse than a knee sprain. A 'good guy' will sometimes shoot someone in the leg or shoulder, 'just to stop him,' and in television and movies, this is almost always nonlethal. In reality, there's no 'safe' place to shoot a person, not even in a seemingly non-vital extremity like a leg or arm. There are huge blood vessels in a human being's shoulder as well as lots of very delicate nerves and a very complex ball-and-socket joint that no surgeon on Earth can put back together once it's smashed by a bullet. The legs also contain large blood vessels; a shot that nicks the femoral artery will cause a fatal loss of blood in only a few minutes.

And this is all assuming a 'clean' through-and-through wound, disregarding the possibility of the bullet glancing off a bone or joint and deflecting or fragmenting into pieces, of which each can then hit something else more important inside. In short, there's no way for anyone, good or bad, to shoot someone and know that they will survive the wound. As they say, if you're shooting at all, you're shooting to kill. But this trope is so widespread that it's that it's an. In truth, since there isn't any safe place to shoot at, police and soldiers usually aim for the center of mass ( i.e. Einstein On The Beach Philip Glass Rar Files. The torso) simply to increase the odds of hitting the person in the first place. Trying to intentionally wing a target increases the odds that you'll miss entirely or end up hitting.

When dealing with dangerous criminals and where innocent lives are on the line, presumably, hitting the target, and only the target, should be top priority. Insofar as this trope has any truth to it at all, it comes from the fact that the largest muscle pads on the human body — about the only type of tissue which can take a wound of impressive visual nastiness that isn't necessarily incapacitating or life-threatening — are in the thighs and the outside ( not the center) of the shoulder. The also suffice, but that particular target zone is often felt to. This is despite it being a relatively common wound among retired soldiers — because of its size, and because getting hit there is ( comparatively) less lethal.

Hitting someone on the other side of their body, in the groin, on the other hand, pretty much guarantees they will bleed out very quickly. When the character insists on this, regardless of evidence to the contrary, he is saying (which he does not, in fact, have to survive). Video Games are usually an exception. Draining a game target's HP is quasi-realistic enough to kill/destroy it even if all damage was to the legs or arms. In games with, taking off a limb may lead to instant death. Very few video games actually feature bleeding and those that do tend to be. Surprisingly, a person suffering a in is often less likely to bleed out due to an autonomic muscle clamping response that closes major blood vessels.