Why do people put pistols in their mouth to kill themselves?
I’m remembering a scene from Fight Club and Possessor where the main characters put pistols in their mouth in an attempt to “kill themselves” (plus other movies I’ve seen).
In Fight Club, Tyler misses (I guess on purpose), and in Possessor, the main character needs to do it after completing a contract (to leave the body she possessed).
In Possessor, the angle suggests she might miss her brain entirely.
I can understand something like a shotgun; it’s not exactly something you can hold to your temple, but why put a pistol in your mouth?
Is it more effective somehow? Does it hit a part of your brain where firing from the side might otherwise leave you alive, yet disabled?
I’m sure you could argue it’s just more dramatic from a movie critic perspective, but I’m sure people have really done this, and it maybe be a case of art imitating life, but I believe it would be the other way around.
Short version:
Basically, the roof of your mouth presents skull bones which are much thinner than many other parts of your skull.
Longer Version:
If you hold the gun with the grip facing downward, as others have said, I guess the hope is you get a shot straight through your medulla oblingata.
If you obliterate that, bam, instant brain death basically.
But if your angle is off, you may only sever your spinal cord, now you get to be mostly conscious, in extreme pain, as you collapse and asphyxiate.
Or you may just blow part of your jaw off. That might not even kill you.
If, on the other hand, you go grip facing up/out, the ole’ Bud Dwyer…
You have a much greater liklihood of obliterating a whole lot of your brain’s frontal lobe, the executive decision part.
probably? You’d lose consciousness completely within seconds, 10(s?) of seconds at most, your brain activity would grind to a complete halt as the massive bleeding would just stop the remainder of your brain from working.
But also: Phinneas Gage.
Sometimes people can survive insane bullshit like this.
Personally, I once met a guy that claimed he’d been shot with a .22 in the forehead, that that was the source of his scar there, and that his forehead skull was actually just thick enough that it stopped the .22 without the fracture creating any spall of loose bone fragments into his brain.
A .22lr is really weak compared to even a pistol round. He could absolutely get shot by it from a distance and stop it with his skull. Hell, I have incredibly thin glasses that are capable of stopping that. Re: topic, You are also forgetting that there are gasses comming off of the pistol that are enough to kill you, even without the bullet. Sadly it’s a story that happens way too often - someone wants to play a joke on someone else, loads blanks, shoots someone from close distance and actually kills them. Rifle blanks have an even more ridiculous lethal range - like 5m. Firearms / firearm safety is no joke.