Can You Dodge A Bullet Fired At You?

In real life, no — you can't dodge a bullet fired at you. A typical rifle round leaves the muzzle at about 750 m/s (2,700 km/h or 1,680 mph), which is more than twice the speed of sound, so the bullet reaches you before the sound of the gunshot does. Even on Mythbusters, dodging only worked at 500 yards using an unrealistically bright flash round and with the target prepared to react.

Popular culture, especially action movies, are in love with some pretty crazy ideas, and dodging bullets seems to be their favorite. Typically, the not-so-good-guy fires at the good guy and the latter, being the protagonist of the movie, effortlessly dodges the bullet. Perhaps you can picture the smug look on the hero’s face.

It seems rather unrealistic, but sometimes, we have to question “impossible” after we’ve seen it enough times. It would certainly be cool, but is undoubtedly a dangerous thing to practice.

Let’s figure this out in more detail.

Reaction Time

If you’re into sports, then you must have heard the term ‘reaction time‘ at least once or twice. Reaction time is a physiological response to an external stimulus; it is essentially a measure of how quickly you ‘react’ to a given visual or physical stimulus. You have likely heard a lot about reaction time in the game of cricket, especially when it comes to fielding; a fielder is considered formidable if they have good reaction times.

This is not only applicable in sports; quick reaction time (or reflexes) is quite a useful trait in many different areas of life.

A ‘good’ reaction time generally implies that a person has a very short or low reaction time; the time elapsed between the moment a ball is hit by the batsmen until it is caught by the fielder, is quite small (running into hundredths of a second!). To react in that short of a span of time with precision is, without a doubt, a rare and impressive skill!

Dodging ‘Normal’ Things

‘Normal’…huh? Now what things would you put in the category of ‘normal’? It is quite difficult to lay the boundaries of normalcy, but since we’re talking about dodging things, let’s formulate some minimum requirements that things have to meet before they grab a coveted spot in the list of things that fall under normalcy.

First off, we want stuff that is big; at least something big enough to clearly see from a distance of a few dozen meters. Then, it shouldn’t be moving a pace where you can’t even see it, much less prepare yourself to dodge it. Even if it’s moving towards you rapidly, there should be some way that you can get the hint to move. There are many other requirements too, but since we’re talking about bullets, those are the only objects that we are interested in.

According to the above guidelines, there are plenty of things that you can safely dodge, and some can be avoided quite easily. Big stuff like chairs, gallons of milk, and someone else’s pet coming to attack you (it happens!) can be easily dodged; similarly, small things like a basketball, a tennis ball, and even a small marble, when thrown by a human being, can be dodged.

But what about dodging a bullet?

Dodging A Bullet

To start with, it’s a very, very dangerous practice. The reason is… well, isn’t it obvious?

A bullet fails at both the criteria of ‘normal’ things that we discussed above; it is extraordinarily small and it moves….well, too damn fast! Still, just for the sake of argument, can you dodge a bullet?

Well, yes. But that’s not a ‘yes’ that applies to every case; rather, it is a ‘yes’ that comes with a long list of caveats.

Different Guns, Different Bullets, And Different Speeds

There are hundreds of gun varieties out there, and there are just as many types of bullets that are used in each. So, quite naturally, the size, speed and momentum of all those bullets vary significantly.

The speed with which a bullet leaves a gun is known as the muzzle velocity. As I said, different types of guns have varying muzzle velocities that can range from 120 meters/second to 1200 meters/second. However, for the sake of the question, let’s talk about an average speed of a bullet that lies somewhere in the middle, roughly 750 meters/second (2740 km/h).

Seeing The Bullet Emerge From The Gun

Dodging something that is moving that fast through the air is really a challenge, and a crazy one at that! There are a host of dangerous variables stacked up against you here. For example, you must have seen bullets leaving the muzzle of a gun in a flashy burst of light in the movies.

Movies use unrealistically bright blank rounds for effect, but in reality, it doesn’t actually happen that way. Therefore, you won’t get much help from your visual faculties when it comes to dodging a gunshot.

So, what is the other aspect of a fired bullet that can be, and actually is, registered by our human senses?

The ‘Crack’ Of A Fired Bullet

You may not see a bullet emerging from the gun, but you can definitely hear the crack as it is fired (provided they are not using a silencer). However, don’t get any ideas; this doesn’t mean that you can simply step aside gracefully as a bullet races towards you (you have to be Neo from The Matrix to accomplish that). For that to even be a possibility of salvation, you have to consider the speed of sound itself.

The speed of sound through air is 343 meters per second, and the average speed of the bullet (that we are considering) is 750 meters/second.

Therefore, the speed of the bullet is greater than the speed of sound itself, which means that the bullet will reach you before you even hear the crack of it being fired from the gun! Chew on that for a while…

How Fast Would Your Reflexes Need To Be?

We’ve tossed the phrase ‘reaction time’ around, so let’s finally pin a number on it. A typical human nervous system takes roughly 190 milliseconds to respond to something it sees, and it’s a shade quicker for something it hears, around 160 milliseconds. Sound wins that race because an auditory signal takes only 8 to 10 milliseconds to reach the brain, whereas a visual one needs 20 to 40 milliseconds to get there.

Now hold that against how long a bullet actually spends in the air. At a muzzle velocity of 750 meters/second, a shooter standing just 10 meters away puts the bullet into you in about 0.013 seconds (13 milliseconds). Back the shooter up to 25 meters and it still arrives in roughly 0.033 seconds. In other words, at across-the-room distances the bullet has already struck you somewhere between five and fifteen times over before your brain has even finished issuing the command to move.

And reaction time is only half the battle. It clocks the instant your muscles begin to twitch, not the moment your body has actually cleared the path of the bullet, which takes far longer still. To genuinely sidestep a round at self-defense range, you’d need reflexes something like 5 to 15 times faster than an ordinary human reaction, depending on how close the gun is. That isn’t athleticism… that’s squarely Neo-from-The Matrix territory. The shock wave Ernst Mach photographed peeling off a bullet back in 1888 (above) is a neat reminder of just how thoroughly a bullet outruns everything your senses have to work with.

Can You Dodge A Bullet From Far Away?

If point-blank range is hopeless, does backing away help? Oddly enough, distance is the only variable that nudges the odds in your favor, and it does so in two ways.

First, the bullet keeps slowing down. Air drag steals speed the entire way downrange. A .308 Winchester round that leaves the muzzle at about 2,820 feet/second (roughly 860 meters/second) has bled down to around 1,812 feet/second (about 550 meters/second) by the time it has traveled 500 yards, shedding more than a third of its speed.

Second, and far more helpful to you, its flight time stretches out. That same .308 round takes about 0.36 seconds to cover 300 yards and about 0.66 seconds to reach 500 yards (roughly 450 meters). Push out to extreme ranges of well over a mile and the time of flight can balloon past six seconds. Suddenly 0.66 seconds is comfortably longer than your ~190-millisecond reaction time, which is precisely why the only ‘dodge’ anyone has ever pulled off (more on that next) happened at 500 yards and not across a room.

Before you feel safe at a distance, though, there’s a catch. Buying yourself a fraction of a second only helps if you get an instant cue the moment the trigger is pulled, and in the real world, you don’t. There’s no movie-style muzzle flash to spot, and because the bullet is faster than the speed of sound, the crack of the shot reaches you after the bullet does, not before. So even when distance technically hands you that sliver of time, you have no reliable way of knowing the clock has started. And no, you can’t simply predict the shot either… reading the exact instant a trigger finger tightens, from hundreds of meters away, is not something human anticipation can be trusted to pull off.

Is It Completely Impossible?

Well, no. With the ideal conditions in place (which is very unlikely to happen in real life), it is not completely impossible to dodge a bullet. In fact, this was demonstrated on a TV show named Mythbusters. Here is the video:

They showed that even with the quickest reaction time of 490 milliseconds, one cannot dodge a bullet standing at a distance of 500 yards (approx. 450 meters) just based on the ‘crack’ sound, because the bullet hits the person before they hear the crack. However, at 500 yards, one can see the flash, and given the same reaction time, can dodge the bullet.

That being said, the conditions in this demonstration are highly controlled; they fired a special blank round that produced a bright flash from a carefully measured distance and the person was totally aware that he was going to be shot at. In real life, however, this is far from practical.

Therefore, it’s perfectly fair to say that you cannot dodge a real bullet in real life. There… I said it!