A pistol fired while excited is not very accurate at any kind of distance. Even a decent shot, if he is rushed, scared, winded will pull too hard, shoot too fast, fail to aim well, assume a bad stance. There's also a big difference between shooting a perfectly stationary paper target at 50 feet and a moving one at 20. The angle change alone makes aiming for a critical point difficult, not to mention how those critical points may change during 100 milliseconds. Bullets aren't light beams and the farther the target, the more the potential for the aim point to move post discharge.
Even with something like deer hunting, a moving shot is not only bad form, it's seldom successful, and that's with a rifle.
Last, not all bullets that connect yield a disabled/killed target. Depends on what is hit, how it's hit, what's in the way, how much adrenaline is circulating, etc.
Hollywood often portrays Clint Eastwood taking out some guy on a horse traveling 20 MPH at an angle to the shooter, a diminishing angular presentation to the shooter, with a projectile that is decreasing in velocity for every foot it travels and dropping in space at the same rate as any other dropped object. The math doesn't add up to the kill rate on screen. Patent bullsht.
Lucky shots do happen, of course. For real life, non-Western gun fights, a case in point is Audie Murphy, of WW2 fame. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audie_Murphy
There are a few other, really improbable cases in WW2 that simply defy comprehension, but he's a pretty good one.
Even with something like deer hunting, a moving shot is not only bad form, it's seldom successful, and that's with a rifle.
Last, not all bullets that connect yield a disabled/killed target. Depends on what is hit, how it's hit, what's in the way, how much adrenaline is circulating, etc.
Hollywood often portrays Clint Eastwood taking out some guy on a horse traveling 20 MPH at an angle to the shooter, a diminishing angular presentation to the shooter, with a projectile that is decreasing in velocity for every foot it travels and dropping in space at the same rate as any other dropped object. The math doesn't add up to the kill rate on screen. Patent bullsht.
Lucky shots do happen, of course. For real life, non-Western gun fights, a case in point is Audie Murphy, of WW2 fame. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audie_Murphy
There are a few other, really improbable cases in WW2 that simply defy comprehension, but he's a pretty good one.
Nice post. Thanks.