Shooting a person

[billmarq]

According to my old west research, most people who were gunshot in a non-vital organ usually lived for hours or even days, in severe pain. There were no trauma centers back then. If the injury didn't kill the victim outright the ensuing infection often did. The movies seldom depict this.

I have always marveled at how huge gunfights between dozens of men could be staged, with each victim of a gunshot dying immediately, and later no one ever goes out to the scene to retrieve any of the bodies.

I was amused by a Gary Cooper movie where a stage coach is attacked. The stage makes it into town and the driver tells the sheriff that the guard was killed a few miles out, and his body left in the road where it fell. "Did the robbers get the gold?" the sheriff asks. Never another mention of the poor dead guy.