Close Call With A Bullet

I’m writing a story about a group of people running from a drug cartel. At one point, my main characters get caught in a standoff with one being taken hostage and used as a human shield. Let’s call her, “R,” to save time. It ends with another character (let’s call him,”T”) making a judgement call and shooting the hostage-taker when they have the opportunity. Surprisingly, it works, and R gets to live another day. At first, things are as hunky-dory as they can be for R when you’re running from a cartel and almost filleted by a madman. But later on, R realizes how close she came to death when she finds that the bullet passed right through her hair, about an inch from the side of her head. (The MC has pretty long hair, so it isn’t immediately noticeable.) This creates a rift between T and R because she realizes the positioning of the shot means that T fired when the hostage-taker was effectively almost completely behind R. While she knows that T was trying to protect her, and she would definitely be dead if he hadn’t intervened, it doesn’t sit well with her that she was more saved by dumb luck than any skill on T’s part.

My problem came when I realized I wasn’t sure if you would feel a bullet whizzing by you in the heat of the moment, rather than figuring it out later. So, is it plausible for you to miss a bullet flying by you in an extremely stressful situation? Even if it goes through your hair?

Not to mention, I’m not really sure how long hair would react to a bullet. When writing the scene, I imagined that a bullet would be so fast it would cut right through the hair without otherwise disturbing it due to it’s speed and lack of resistance. But, then again, a bullet might do more ripping than cutting, as hair can be around as strong as copper wire of the same length. So the sheer force might snag the hair and rip through it more violently. And that would definitely be felt. I don’t expect I’ll be able to get a straight answer, as I seriously doubt anybody would have done a study of such a specific scenario, much less firsthand knowledge. But, truth can be stranger than fiction, so maybe there’s hope. Does anybody have any ideas?

Are you kidding me? That’d be amazing! Don’t go to too much trouble, though. I’m just some random guy on the internet, after all.

That’s part of what I’m trying to ask. The hair part was more about the fact she now has real, physical evidence of just how close the bullet came to hitting her.

I considered doing that when I started writing the scene, but later I heard from a family friend that a graze wound feels like it’s on fire when it happens. I figured there’d be a bigger chance she’d notice immediately.

Unfortunately I already have a scene that specifically mentions that R’s stuck with only one change of clothes, with the shirts just being cheap t-shirts. No thick collars or long sleeves. Good idea, though. In retrospect that would’ve been WAY easier.

The story calls for a pistol, but go nuts man. It’s awesome that somebody would be willing to do this in the first place!

Very informative! Thank you so much!