Oh joy. I am gone for the weekend and come back to see my thread has turned into the same discussion about reality of bullet wounds vs melee weapons. Nice to see some people still trotting out the double standard no matter how many times in other threads it's pointed out how it's a double standard. And the same old myths keep getting repeated as well.
The idea that gunshots are exponentially more fatal than something like a sword or axe is a myth. People have this weird idea (I don't know why, maybe from movies where good guys take out all the bad guys with one shot and they immediately die) that a single gun shot should be fatal in most cases, and dismiss the game part of the equation because "reality". Well, the reality is that a single gun shot is rarely fatal. Even multiple gun shot wound victims don't have a fatality rate all that high. A recent study by the Boston PD over a 4 year period has the numbers as 27% of single gun shot victims died, and 65% of multiple gunshot victims died. In game terms, these are commoners, not PCs or heroes.
I did medivac for a bit when I was a Black Hawk crewchief in the Army, and we have something called the "golden hour". That means if we get the victim to a hospital within an hour, the chances of them surviving goes way up. If you have access to near instant magical healing in a game, the survival rate would be almost 100%. So this idea that guns need to be extremely lethal to be realistic is just wrong. It would make them less realistic by doing so.
Additionally, PCs are supposed to be representative of the heroes and the exceptional small % of the population. In real life, the equivalent would be people like Blackbeard, Rasputin, Audie Murphy, Simo Häyhä, Fazal Din, Lachhiman Gurung, Carton de Wiart, and about a thousand others. People who took severe punishment and kept on fighting.
So can we please, please stop with this "guns need to be way more lethal than swords or it's not realistic" nonsense? The mechanics of D&D are just fine for emulating a heroic wild west genre. To argue otherwise is to hold a double standard of lethality for swords vs guns, and to ironically ignore what you're claiming you need to have: reality