I agree with BreOl72. I always thought of it from that accuracy pov. Even a shot to the arm placement matters both in pain, blood loss, muscle/bone integrity, etc.

Aside from that, the other issue is just the overall picture of how damage scales from skills and items. If casters/melee have a mechanism for damage scaling from stats (strength, intelligence, magic, etc.) then it's going to be hard to balance ranged classes/attacks without a similar stat->dmg conversion.

Likewise, unless you want damage to be stagnant for long stretches of the game, it either has to scale off stats, or you have to constantly be introducing new weapons, either models or +1/electric etc. modifiers. From a development pov, just converting stats is both cheaper to code and typically easier to balance around, isn't it?

In Bloodborne, leveling Bloodtinge makes your bullets stronger, because the bullets are drenched in 9r made from your blood, and bloodtinge makes your own blood more potent and toxic to others.

I think it makes sense for strength and accuracy to be relevant stats to a gun's lethality, especially in the lower levels.

For strength, you need enough to be able to hold the gun accurately without shaking and to handle the kickback. Imagine a kid firing a gun vs an adult.

For accuracy, I think people have already stated but more accuracy means better aim which means more damage by shooting between the eves vs grazing the arm.

There's also the issue that accuracy-focused growth mechanics just don't scale to high levels. Inevitably, if accuracy and evasion grow as characters get stronger, and final accuracy uses something like an (accuracy - evasion) rule, you get one of two situations at higher levels:
* All attacks hit
* All attacks miss
(Except on the equivalent of a natural 1 or 20, if the game has similar rules.)

In any case, this becomes *really* hard to balance, and if you look at games that use such mechanics at high levels, you find that they fall into one of those categories, or individual characters might fall on some side of this (so one character always hits, and another always misses). It gets to the point that there's no point in increasing accuracy or evasion, which in games where armor affects evasion (instead of defense) can make armor pointless.

(I note that Dungeons & Dragons, in all its versions, and similar systems, tend to experience this issue at higher levels, and it becomes a serious problem if you try to scale those systems to high levels.)

I think to be fair, most people are rather gun ignorant. We have real politicians so dumb, to make legislature regarding high caliber rifles being thought to function like heat seeking missiles. I'm sad to say this isn't a joke, people are really dumb.

So making games and movies where people don't know how guns function is never surprising to me. Annoying yes. Surprising? No.