So My Character Is A Bit Trigger Happy...

...and I'd like to know where she could shoot a person and not kill them. Most of the time (when she's not working as a body-guard) she shoots people with rubber bullets but it's at a very close range. Those she shoots with real bullets are genuine threats to the populace and if ordered to only "Shoot to Wound" she'll do just that. I'd just like to know where she should shoot them.

There is no such thing as shoot to wound. You could quite possibly shoot someone and not have them die, but you can't ever be certain it won't kill them.

Let's just say my character has shot enough people to know where to shoot them so they don't die. Unfortunately, I don't share her intimate knowledge.

The point is that there is nowhere 'safe' or 'non-lethal' to shoot a person. Even if you shoot them in the leg or foot, there are several major arteries there and there's a big possibility that they'll bleed to death.

In the hair.

The only way to ensure it is to shoot in one of the extremites, and to have a paramedic on hand.

On a related note, where's the best place to shoot someone if you don't want to damage any of their bones? Assume the weapon is being fired at point-blank range, and the target is restrained.

For context, a small group of mages are trying to escape an enemy prison during the middle of a massive battle. Unfortunately, they're not sure where they should be heading and what the base's layout is... and with the guards bearing down on them, they need answers quickly. So they kidnap an enemy soldier and administer the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique. The tool is one of the enemy's own weapons, a gun that fires rounds coated in a poison designed to incapacitate the target via indescribable agony (assuming that the hit doesn't kill them in the first place).

They have a healer and empath (the latter to work as a Living Lie Detector) on standby, but one drawback of their magic is that while it's great at flushing out poisons and regenerating living tissue, it doesn't work so well with already-dead stuff like osseous tissue. Hence, bone damage is best avoided.

edited 11th Dec '10 6:47:03 AM by Iaculus

@Mammalsauce But then you can't wound them lol

...and I'd like to know where she could shoot a person and not kill them. Most of the time (when she's not working as a body-guard) she shoots people with rubber bullets but it's at a very close range. Those she shoots with real bullets are genuine threats to the populace and if ordered to only "Shoot to Wound" she'll do just that. I'd just like to know where she should shoot them.

are you looking for the middle ground between kill and wound or just wound? how plausible is the shot supposed to be?

On a related note, where's the best place to shoot someone if you don't want to damage any of their bones? Assume the weapon is being fired at point-blank range, and the target is restrained.

places where bones aren't like the abdomen, but then you get into excruciating death problems. perhaps shooting off a digit would be a better option.

I think grazing a calf would be plausable for the poisoned ones.

How fast is the excruciating death for the abdomen-shot? Again, very effective magical healing is ready and available, but it'd be nice to know how long the interrogators would be able to leave their victim in pain before things get irreversible. They're a bunch of scared, desperate teenagers in their first real fight, and it'd be very easy for them to screw this up.

edited 11th Dec '10 11:31:30 AM by Iaculus

Sometimes your best bet with this sort of thing is to keep using the old unrealistic tropes. Rule of Cool is not to be underestimated, and few will notice or care. If you're focusing on realism, of course, just ignore me.

Was that addressed to me or the OP?

The OP.

Do you think claiming "Rubber Bullets" would be enough to Hand Wave a point blank shot?

depends on the gun, caliber, and poison. larger calibers would tear up the organs from the shock wave generated, something smaller might pass right trough but it might nick stuff like one or more of the kidneys, intestines, bladder, etc. causing blood loss sepsis or poisoning, a smaller one would bounce around shredding stuff. the poison might help or hurt depending on inflammation among other things.

I'd speculate somewhere between 30 seconds to an hour would work well for your story.

ninja'd

edited 11th Dec '10 11:45:26 AM by GiantSpaceChinchilla

point blank? no even BBs are deadly there.

A biology note - bone tissue isn't dead. The hard mineral matrix of bone is actually full of a network of cells, and it's growing and changing constantly and very much alive.

If there's a reason you need bone to be harder to fix, you'll need to come up with something else. Perhaps it just takes longer to secrete the minerals.

edited 11th Dec '10 3:01:10 PM by LoniJay

Ah? Actually that still works pretty well. The magic can then recreate the cells but not do their job for them, meaning that the bone tissue still takes a while to properly fix, but heals faster than it would with modern medical science alone.

If that were the case, how long would it take for the cells to do their thing and the bones to be put back in full working order? I'd imagine that they'd be a little squidgy and fragile for a while after the healing.

I'm not actually sure about that. Seeing as you're working with magic, I would just make it be whatever time period suits you.

(going into more detail here, if you don't want it just ignore it) What happens with bone regeneration is that old or broken bone is quickly eaten away by one type of cell. Then another type of cell comes along and secretes the matrix. Once it's done that it is trapped, and remains alive embedded in the bone and maintaining it. So I suppose your magic would speed up the removal of damaged stuff, and cause new cells to be created much faster than normal.

I think you'd probably have to keep the bone in a splint or completely immobile while the bone is regenerating, or it could be bent out of shape, same as with natural healing.

edited 11th Dec '10 5:17:07 PM by LoniJay

Yes, that works very well - gives a good reason for the healing of bones to be a thing best avoided, especially since everything else can be sorted without specialised equipment like casts and splints if you don't mind the mental and physical strain it puts on the healer in question.