this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
65 points (95.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36108 readers
1092 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] Maalus 1 points 1 day ago

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.