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.
Shotgun physics get complicated. I remember hearing a case where the gas in front of the slug (or shot or whatever) propelled the shotgun out of the victim’s mouth, and the shot ended up skimming off their face.
Leaving them disfigured but very much alive.
In any case, suicide is largely an emotional thing rather than logical. Don’t read too much into it.
But if you’re up for a dark laugh on the topic of conscientious suicide, consider https://youtu.be/snjCj0ntG8E?si=8omBU_VZA_MqL-Lp
Also to add, look up suicide stats in England after coal gas was replaced with natural gas. Suddenly, poison gas was less available. Not only did gas related suicides drop, all suicides drop.
No way to prove causation, but for a lot of people, the decision to kill yourself depends a lot on convenience. There isn’t a lot of planning involved.
Many suicides being opportunistic is why a small barrier or a sign added to a bridge or railway can prevent a lot of suicides. Most suicides aren’t really well thought out, they happen because the victim happens to see an opportunity right at the wrong time. Making them walk around a barrier can be enough to dissuade them from trying (that day, at that spot).
It’s no wonder so many Americans kill themselves using guns. They’re deadly, death is instant when done right with no suffering, and they’re accepted to have laying around. Knives and pills will also do the job but they’re not as quick and easy, and often become quite gruesome and painful ways to go if not stopped in time. That said, preferred methods of suicide are different for different groups of people, for instance with men typically choosing a rather violent yet effective methods while women typically choose less violent (but easier to survive) methods.
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Pills in blister packs instead of a bottle also reduces suicides. Just having to open a bunch of pill blisters instead of downing a bottle makes a noticeable difference.
There was an occasional reddit repost that I remember seeing a few times about a guy who invented a “suicide helmet” specifically to avoid the prospect of botching his own planned attempt. It basically was a bunch of shotgun shells wired up to a detonator and fused into a hardhat. The level of planning and makeshift engineering that went into it was astounding, and the dude explained it all in his suicide note. It worked. On one hand I can see how someone who is determined to die but afraid of pain would want to make sure the process was instantaneous and extremely lethal, on the other hand, it’s fucked up to think about how much the guy must have dwelt on the idea of killing himself, knowing it wasn’t just a spur-of-the-moment opportunity where he shoved a gun in his mouth like most people would have done.
Wow that case you mention is fucked.
I can’t imagine life after blowing my face off, on top of whatever made things bad enough to go that far.
You’re aiming for the medulla oblongata, the part of the brain that controls all the autonomic function like respiration and cardiac function. It’s right at the top of the spinal column. Hit that, and it’s lights out instantly. The easiest way to thin about the location is by putting a stick in your mouth and trying to touch you uvula, and then angled very slightly up from there, basically right through the soft palette.
That’s why a gun in the mouth is so often used in films and TV; it’s essentially correct.
The part which makes the crocodile angry?
No that’s because they got all them teeth and ain’t got no toothbrush
The idea is that you’ll go through the brain stem.
Which, it can. It just isn’t a guarantee.
But you gotta realize that movies, even ones that are meant to be mostly realistic, fudge that kind of stuff a lot. There’s insurance reasons even when they don’t care about showing it accurately, and most of the folks that work as the gun safety manager (can’t remember the right term for the job) will raise immortal hell if someone makes it too realistic. Well, the few I’ve talked to anyway.
As you surmised, “Tyler” missed on purpose. The narrator “Jack/Joe” is aiming at Tyler, it’s not meant to kill the body at all. Iirc, Tyler tended to be on that side of the narrator more often than not, so they picked that side. Can’t recall where I ran across that, though. Which is all tangential anyway.
But, putting a gun to your temple is pretty bad too. Just as likely to end up a vegetable. None of the positions used in movies are all that great if you want it to work, and that’s a good thing. It’s at least sometimes intentional, like how they fudge recipes for dangerous things (like they did in fight club) just enough that it won’t work right. They’ll give the big brush strokes to satisfy the chemistry nerds sometimes, but omit important steps.
It’s been ages since I researched suicide success rates (for a book, no bullshit, though I never used that part of my notes), but you never see the ones that are as close to 100% as it gets with firearms, or most OD/poison scenes either.
A lot of times the director and writers just don’t care about accuracy though. They just use tropes that are good on camera. Seriously, you’d be amazed at how much of most movies just hand wave as “good enough” because it’s what people think should be there. Like the “one phone call” thing when someone gets arrested, or not being able to file a missing persons report until however long they need it to be for the plot. I think screen rant did an article about that kind of thing a while back.
When it’s an action movie in particular, John Wick levels of almost realism isn’t the norm. It really is all about making it look good on screen, so don’t expect most of that stuff to hold up to someone that does whatever it is irl. It’s also common in books to do the research and still fudge things because reality gets in the way of telling a story sometimes. Which, again, tangential.
What isn’t tangential is that because people think that movies are realistic, they’ll do things the way it’s seen on screen. You ever get in a fight as a kid and someone was doing those stupid cowboy movie roundhouses? Great way to get knocked the fuck out because you’re wide open and not delivering power where it needs to be. But it looks great on screen.
Guns are no different. People do what they think will work, often because they don’t know better. But, in the internet age, they may think to look it up, but get worried they’ll get found out, or be “put on a list” (which is a trope of its own). So they just follow the on screen directions, and wake up without a face, or maybe don’t wake up and are hooked up instead.
It’s also common in books to do the research and still fudge things because reality gets in the way of telling a story sometimes. Which, again, tangential.
Andy Weir did the math for every single thing that happens in The Martian, often on the page in front of you. His guesses at the internal structure of NASA were so accurate that NASA thought he had an inside source. He still had to fake the fact that a dust storm could blow over a rocket on Mars, because there was no other way to strand Watney there without his crew.
Martian dust storms really do reach hundreds of kilometres an hour. But F is MA. And the density of Martian air is so low that M is stuck being tiny. So there’s very little force in a Martian gale.
Way I had it explained to me is it has a good chance of severing the brain stem, supposedly killing you quicker than a hole through multiple parts of your brain matter which is a way some people survive the attempt. Also, suicide by gun is a lot quicker and easier than something like taking a knife to one of your veins, either the “results” way or the “attention” way.
That said, sometimes it’s a moment of none thinking. Some people see a quick out and take it. I was once told an annecdote from a client I met at work about a friend of his who everyone thought was fine right until he was cutting fire wood one day and opted to throw his throat on a running chainsaw. Anyone thinking for more than a couple of seconds realises that’s an extraordinarily horrible way to go out, but sometimes that 1 is all it takes.
That might even just be the “call of the void.” Throw in some very minor extras, like alcohol or a bad day at work, and it’s easy to see someone heeding that call.
Having experienced it personally before now, yup. Very easy.
It’s why I’m afraid of heights. My brain freaks me out sometimes. I’m by no means suicidal but when I see off a high place I wonder what it would be like to fall. I almost feel compelled by the rush of it.
Reminds me of a line from a Jim Carrey stand-up. On the subject of that little voice in the back of your head “Turning the vehicle into on-coming traffic would be COUNTERPRODUCTIVE”
I had a friend with a lake house, and it was five stories from the deck to the lake. We spent about an hour jumping off, running up the stairs and jumping again.
You’d think it would have helped my call of the void, especially around heights, but it made it worse. Ah well, it was fun.
I work at heights daily, climbing 100m towers. I’m also scared of heights. I’ve done some cliff dives into deep water as another way to face that fear. It takes a force of will for me to jump off more than about 10m. Sure wish I enjoyed that thrill.
Anecdotal: my uncle put the pistol in his mouth and missed the kill shot. Instead, as I understand it (I was young and I’m not asking), it clipped his brain stem. It disabled most of his bodily function and they had to install a feeding tube due to mouth damage. He spent 2 months in the hospital before finally passing. He had a fucked up bout with cancer and couldn’t take it anymore.
People fuck this up all the time, including putting their gun to their temple. It is apparently fairly easy to actually leave yourself alive by mistake when you’re doing this. Then rather than being dead, you’re looking at a lifetime of blindness or brain damage.
Because they do not want to think.
They have seen that in movies. They imagine that you cannot miss.
What’s the other option? To put it sideways against the head. I have heard that you can miss very easy then, like just scratch the skull or smash your teeth. It is an uncomfortable position, and the hand probably shakes a lot.
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.
I have no experience nor done any research into this topic but I would think that a gun to the temple is easier to mess up resulting in either a slow death or a non-lethal shot with a life altering disability or disfigurment.
Gun in the mouth is more guaranteed a kill shot. Under the chin would probably be even more guaranteed. Just be sure to aim up and not back.
I think aiming back/down towards the spinal chord/medulla oblongata, not up, would be more effective in guaranteeing death. That said, suffocating on an inert gas would likely be less painful as you’d pass out after only a few seconds and then die within minutes. Don’t ask me how I know.
Best way is through the eyes.
Yep. Thats actually even less bone thickness in the way than the roof of your mouth, and is more likely to destroy more of your brain, with the bullet trajectory going through most of it.
Movies are not real life!
I imagine in the worst case you could miss the brain but the muzzle flash could potenttially blow off your lower jaw.
