Completely unfazed? Hit between eyes? No amount of drugs will help you if you permanently lost ability to move.
That's the kicker, a headshot is not
guaranteed to do that. These cases are very rare, but they do exist. The bullet bounces, gets stuck between the eyes, goes through the skull without hitting something immediately lethal, passes through the eye, etc. The person might die in another 10 minutes (and beat you to death while the adrenalin is still up), might stay but not particularly energetic, might go down.
You pretty much need to hit
exactly between the eyes and no higher to get a guaranteed stoppage. Small purse guns in the .30 caliber range are especially infamous for this, but even a 9mm/.38 cal is still on the edge.
Look up Tammy Sexton or Daniel von Bargen, for instance. One made tea right afterwards, the other called the ambulance himself. There's also a video of some badass Russian from the early 2000s getting shot
between the eyes - that is, a little above the eyes - with a
Kalashnikov and
smiling for the camera after it gets pried out of his skull.
Even if it do not penetrate your skull it could knock you out as it have comparable energy to heavy boxer punch.
It could. It also might not. The damage they do is different. A boxer hits you over a much larger area and doesn't make a hole in your skull.
There are even stories of soldiers getting shot in the head
with a rifle while wearing a helmet, surviving and killing their assailant right after. E.g. Kyle Keenan, Ryan Stumpff. A bullet is not a knockout punch.
This is whole point, if you hit critical organ then even 9mm can one hit you, if you hit only not important ones, you can spend whole clip and still have live enemy.
Yes, I agree that this is true in the vast majority of cases. But there
are rare exceptions, and getting shot with a rifle instead of a handgun is
far more likely to kill or disable somebody even with a 'flesh wound'. Same thing with hand cannon vs rifle, grenade vs non-HE cannon, artillery vs grenade, etc.
This is someway comparable to dagger vs greater sword, against armored enemy in hand of skilled fighter dagger can do a lot of more damage than any sword.
In general, a dagger guy (skilled or not) will get their head caved in by a twohander long before they manage to get their wrestling on. There's a reason people did not field pure 'dagger fighters'. Of course one might get lucky. All sorts of weird stuff can happen in combat.
A guy
with a dagger, superiour armoured wrestling and another longer weapon to make it into grappling range, that's another thing entirely. Dagger skills don't really come into this. 'Stab him in the eyes or armpit while he's pinned' isn't an advanced
dagger move.
Also, half-swording says hi.
TLDR, my point is
not that you cannot outperform a rifle with better-placed handgun shots, or a literal hand cannon with a rifle. Of course that can happen. But it is the
averages that count for in-game
weapon stats. A graze from a cannon round is worse than a graze from a bullet and a headshot will
take your head off instead of 'most likely' killing you. One really should not try to balance weapon stats using outliers.
