>They had collected thousands of dropped muskets and found many had multiple rounds pounded into them. The soldiers went through the actions of life and adding as trained but wouldn't pull the trigger. IIRC, this led to a study where they tested the marksmanship of whole fire platoons. They'd have them fire at big, formation-width white sheets, and found absurd accuracy, very close to 100% of the shots from the 500 men struck the sheets. Then they'd try to simulate combat conditions, obscuring the targets with smoke and marching the men hard to get them stressed out. Their accuracy did decrease a bit, but not very significantly. But in combat, volleys that should be killing dozens of men, in the open, only strike like 2 in the legs, maybe some unlucky fucker gets one in the belly. It was theorized that men were aiming high at the moment of firing, staring into the face of a man and killing him is difficult for most humans. Even ruthless murderers/executions like Che Guevara (press f to spit) could never shoot his victim in the face, always forced them to look away. Executioners throughout history have issues with this, hence often putting a sack over the condemned's head before hanging or beheading. Interestingly, it's theorized that most of the greatest killers of earlier wars might have been psychopaths who simply had no qualms with killing another person because they have no feelings about it. Then you'd have people fighting with zealous fury who would probably kill effectively. But besides that, usually we just shout at each other and try to avoid a lethal fight by nature.