Getting shot is kind of scary.

You know how in movies and games people get shot all the time and always come back completely fine? You want to know why it works that way?

Because if all gun fights in fiction where like the ones in real life no one would go watch those movies.

Now, I haven’t been shot myself (and I hope I never get to experience that) but I have a big imagination, a lot of curiosity and a huge amount of free time, which is why I ended up writing this whole article about how getting shot works.

Why? Because I am also writing a story that involves getting shot. Stay with me for a moment, I promise the reason behind my “investigation” is interesting.

You see, my story is inspired by the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop game, which is where that one buggy videogame was inspired from, and like any good tabletop 2020 has a section where it explains how combat works.

It’s inside of this section where they go on to explain how, in real life, gun fights aren’t particularly a fun experience, which is why 2020’s combat is the way it is. It also goes on to explain how, when most people get shot, they don’t technically die just because they got shot, they die because of what happens as a result of getting shot.

Being the curious person that I am, and interested in how 2020’s combat ends up being more lethal as a result of trying to be realistic, I decided to go dig a little further on how shot wounds actually work, because once I had started to write a little gun fight on my story, I had to ask myself “Is this actually how it’s supposed to work?”

So, first thing first; I am not a doctor, nor am I a gun expert, so don’t follow everything I say here to the letter, because some of it, a lot even, may be wrong.

A man with a gun pulls the trigger, the gun vomits a bullet at high speeds, the bullet goes through a poor victim, we all know how this goes, it always looks the same in the movies.

The actual thing that harms you when you get shot is the bullet which, depending on the specific type of bullet and weapon that fires it, comes with its own kinds of problems.

The first kind of damage that comes from it is tearing, that’s how the bullet enters your body. Why? Momentum. The bullet is fired with a certain amount of speed, and once it enters your body it abruptly loses some of that speed, it can ricochet too... The bigger the bullet the more damage it does to your body when entering.

Luckily, this also means that if said bullet hits something else while on its trajectory it loses speed and does less damage on hits. Say it hits the door of your car and then you, you still get shot but it’s less shock than what it was before.

The damage alone of that tear can harm your organs, even if it didn’t actually hit them, and you can also pass out from the pain and shock of having a hole torn on your body.

What happens after the bullet enters is the most dangerous part… because it’s unpredictable. It can ricochet inside of your own body, it could hit important organs or other important parts of your body, like arteries for example.

It generally depends on the direction the bullet has taken but according to most of the sites google showed me it really comes down to luck. Like I’ve said multiple times it could ricochet or, depending on the type of bullet, it could fragment or it could even stop and not hit anything vital.

It’s as if God himself span a wheel and the result determines what happens to you…

And then, after the bullet enters and does whatever it’s supposed to do, comes the real killer. No, it’s not a joke, this part is what actually kills a lot of people.

Blood loss, mostly a product of where the bullet decides where it wants to go and, if it pierces anything important, expect a massive amount of bleeding, combine this with shock and you get the idea. You can, also, pass out thanks to blood loss, so that's another thing to keep an eye out for.

That said, just because you get shot it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the line. According to my “research”, if your heart is still beating there’s a chance. The first thing you should do is obviously call for help, try and stop the bleeding, and so on.

Since the biggest part of surviving a gunshot falls on luck, you could technically get shot several dozen times and survive (Please don’t try that) and there are cases where people who got shot multiple times lived. However, there’s also cases where people took several shot wounds and died, and even situations where they were technically dead (as in too many bullets to important parts) and stayed conscious for several minutes (until they died).

Basically, getting shot is bad, really bad, and there’s a lot of things that can go wrong once someone gets shot, but it doesn’t necessarily mean your life is over.