You Always Hear the Bullet

"If you hear the shot, you're still alive."

Bang! Hit! Fall to ground!

This trope describes the standard order of sound effects whenever someone gets hit by a bullet: gunshot sound, then exploding Squib to simulate the hit. In real life, because most bullets travel faster than the speed of sound, the order is actually the bullet hitting, then the sound of the gunshot catching up.

Note that this only applies when one is standing at a distance and someone is shooting at you; Anyone standing next to the shooter will not experience a significant enough lag between the events to notice much of a difference, unless the bullet travels a very long distance (light being much faster than sound or a bullet)

This trope is so common, it may be considered an Omnipresent Trope. Indeed, most of the examples below are notable as aversions of this trope rather than indications of the countless times this appears in media as the standard effect for simulated gunfire.

Related is the sound effects of a silenced weapon. While in real life, the explosion of the bullet is muted, you will still hear the mechanical noises of the gun itself. In TV land, these guns are completely and utterly silent. See also The Coconut Effect.

NOTE: As of March 9, 2010, this page mostly only lists aversions of this trope. Ranking it a dead horse.

Examples of You Always Hear the Bullet include:

Comic Books

• Averted hard in The Killing Joke. The shot that paralyzes Barabara Gordon has no sound effect. It is never heard.

Fan Works

• In Poke Wars Dawn of a New Era, Dawn kills three Fearow with long range shots. It is explicitly stated that the sonic booms came after the fatal shots.

Film

• Averted in the 1972 Clint Eastwood film Joe Kidd: when Kidd and a band of Mexican revolutionaries come under fire at extreme range by a sniper using a scoped buffalo rifle the sequence is shown in proper order (muzzle smoke - bullet sound - gunshot) reflecting the relative speeds (light, bullet, sound) involved.
• Averted in Quigley Down Under. At one point you see three mooks drop dead, and then you hear the gunshot. Quigley had watched for hours, waiting until three guys stood in a row, so he could pull it off.
• In most movies, the sound heard by the person being shot at is more like the sound the person firing the weapon should hear.
  • In particularly bad examples, the gunshot will be accompanied by a ricochet sound, even when there is nothing for the bullet to ricochet off of.
  • True. Also, despite this trope's name, hearing the bullet traveling through the air and hearing the report of the gun that fired it are two different things. In reality you do hear bullets "whiz by" when they pass nearby, even if the sound of the actual gunshot hasn't reached you yet. As two characters said in Black Hawk Down:

Grimes: Why aren't you shooting?
Waddell: We're not being shot at yet.
Grimes: How can you tell?
Waddell: A hiss means it's close, a snap means-

• SNAP*
  

Waddell: Now they're shooting at us!

Literature

• Averted in an early Animorphs book: Jake hears two shots during a fight in a Yeerk-held hospital - but doesn't hear the one that hits him.
• Averted in the novel Freedom and Necessity by Emma Bull and Steven Brust, where one character observes that she falls down, realises she's been shot, and then hears the bang.
• In a particular Lillith Saintcrow book, the main character gets annoyed with herself for flinching at the sound of a gunshot, reminding herself that if she heard the shot, it means it didn't hit her.
• Quite deliberately averted in the Dresden Files. Kincaid once stated that if he wanted to kill Dresden, he'd use a supersonic round from a sniper rifle to do it, so that Dresden would die before he heard the bullet and realized he needed to ready a death curse. At the end of Changes, Dresden is shot and killed by a supersonic sniper bullet.

Live Action TV

• Nicely averted in an early episode of Boardwalk Empire, in which a villain is killed by a sniper while dining. The first indication of the shot is a glass shattering and a hiss sound. Everybody in the retaurant looks around in confusion for a beat before we see the victim with a hole in his face, and then the hole in the window, and the sniper a block away.
• Leave it to the ultra-realistic Band of Brothers to avert another gunfire trope. Winters gets winged in the leg by a random shot that has no sound effect associated with it.
• Intensely averted in the final episode of The Sopranos.
• A noted early episode of M*A*S*H (television) called "Sometimes You Hear The Bullet" has an old friend of Hawkeye writing a book from the soldier's perspective, which he will call "You Never Hear the Bullet." When he later is shot and the bullet turns out not an Instant Death one, he tells Hawkeye with some irony, "I heard the bullet," and then dies, leaving Hawkeye shattered. This episode is noteworthy as being the first in the series to examine the serious consequences of war (and in a much less heavy-handed way than would be commonplace in later years).

Video Games

• Averted in tactical shooter Operation Flashpoint, in which sound travel time is simulated, so it's entirely possible to be killed by a bullet before the report of the rifle that fired it reaches you. All other sounds follow the same rules, so if a huge explosion takes place a few kilometers away from, the sound reaches you several seconds later.
• The flavor text for Unreal Tournament III's Sniper Rifle averts this, mentioning that the NEG Marines say "any shot you hear is nothing to be worried about." It's played straight in-game, however: the bullets are Hit Scan, the sound is instantaneous, and the rounds are all tracers, so you know where the sniper shot from too.
• Also averted in Battlefield 2 . Tested with an M82 .50cal AMR from somewhat 400m away. The bullet impacted half a second before the shot is heard. The bullet's initial speed was set to about 850 m/s...
• Speaking of the Barrett, this is also averted in one portion of Modern Warfare 3 - at one point halfway through, you are treated to a flashback to Call of Duty 4, specifically the mission where the player as Captain Price shot at Zakhaev from a mile away, with the player now viewing from someone who was within the target area. If you pay attention to the hotel, you can see the muzzle flash from Price's rifle a full three seconds before Zakhaev's arm flies off, followed about half a second later by the actual firing sound.

Western Animation

• Averted in, of all things, Robot Chicken. Poor, poor Fumbles...

Web Original

• Played Straight most of the time in the play by post RP Survival of the Fittest.

Real Life

• Despite what many people here think, not all bullets are supersonic. A .45 ACP (used in the Colt M1911 and the Thompson, among many others) is significantly slower. Even within a caliber, different manufacturers produce different loads. Special ammunition to fire bullets below the speed of sound are not uncommon; certain 9mm rounds are designed for subsonic speed, and are commonly used with silenced weapons. In short, some guns, especially older ones and handguns, will actually follow this trope.
  • Of course, such subsonic rounds or firearms are often especially kept subsonic for use with a silencer, meaning that there's almost no noise to go by (guns specifically chosen for their ability to perform quietly can actually get reasonably close to being a Hollywood Silencer). There's also the issue that while the rounds may not be supersonic, they still travel at a high subsonic speed; so while the sound may get to you before the bullet, it usually beats it to the mark by margin shorter than the human reaction time. Essentially, while this trope would be technically correct under such cases, it's still of no real practical use.