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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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and i'm trying to think of an explanation

Obviously, he was using a weapon that only did 33 damage. Human beings have 100 HP; upon reaching 0 you become a ragdoll, but you'll be perfectly fine and suffer no ill effects even if you only have 1 HP. (This is why using .50 BMG, or other guns that can do 100 or more damage, are considered war crimes- people just hate the instakill meta.)

In all seriousness, it's not the getting shot that kills you, it's the other biological consequences of what happens when you get a hole punched in a part of you that may result in death, where the cells that make you up can't get enough fuel or oxygen to sustain the combustion reaction necessary for life (as in, you can't breathe, or you have no more blood) and die. When people appear to die instantly from this, it's mainly because the hole that was punched in them resulted in an immediate, catastrophic loss of blood flow (that system is also pressurized, so this tends to be really dramatic).

The meta for killing things is to create either larger holes, or more holes, so that this process happens faster. As a general rule, concealable weapons (handguns, especially the smaller ones) are relatively bad at making the large holes, so they have to depend on many holes in the most vital part of the target; typically in the blood pump [heart], the air intake/exhaust manifolds [lungs], or by destroying the ECU's ability to run either of the former two [brain]. You can make bigger more destructive holes with a rifle, but it's useless if you can't even get the gun into the fight.