Even with the heavy barrel and the muzzlebrake the rifle bucked up off the rest. When he pulled the animals back into the scope he could see them all standing as before. It took the 150 grain bullet the better part of a second to get there but it took the sound twice that. They were standing looking at the plume of dust where the bullet had hit. Then they bolted. Running almost immediately at top speed out upon the barrial with the long whaang of the rifleshot rolling after them and caroming off the rocks and yawing back across the open country in the early morning solitude.
Moss felt something tug at the bag on his shoulder. The pistolshot was just a muffled pop, flat and small in the dark quiet of the town. He turned in time to see the muzzleflash of the second shot faint but visible under the pink glow of the fifteen foot high neon hotel sign. He didnt feel anything. The bullet snapped at his shirt and blood started running down his upper arm and he was already at a dead run. With the next shot he felt a stinging pain in his side. He fell down and got up again leaving Chigurh’s shotgun lying in the street. Damn, he said. What a shot.
We can see in these two texts
some topics that films usually don´t represent quite well. In the first one,
some antelopes can see the dust where the bullet had hit and in less than a
second after , they listen to the gunshot. So, it´s a rifle with supersonic
bullets that they move faster than the sound (340 m/s). This is something usual
in rifles and machine guns . I think it would be easy to representate it in
films but they don´t do it because the result wouldn´t be very intuitive.
A bit more complicated is the
second text because of the inclusion of the speed of light, higher than the
speed of sound. If you were shot by a sniper with one of these rifles, you´d
notice the following order of things: firstly, the burst of light, especially
if you were shot at night. After that, you´d notice the impact of the bullet (or
you´d listen to the whistling of the bullet nex to to you) and in the end,
you´d listen to the ´bang!´.It´s a bit confusing and the opposite of the
natural order you can imagine. I think that´s the reason why film directors
don´t take the opinion of fussy people like me into account.
Cormac McCarthy is really into
the topic of the speed of bullets as he also talked about it in The Road
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