A Coen Brothers movie means many things, including weird killers and weirder killings. From laconic Upper Midwesterners shoving victims into wood chippers to Prince Valiant–coiffed psychopaths offing folks with cattle stun guns, these brothers’ films are plenty grim.

The angel of death in this year’s Oscar-nominated No Country For Old Men is one Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who’s on the trail of $2 million in stolen drug money (and the guy who stole it). While his weapon of choice is a sawed-off semi-automatic shotgun, he’s got something else—equally odd and cumbersome—up his denim sleeve: a captive bolt pistol, aka a cattle stun gun, which he uses to kill a person and knock locks out of doors.

“Stunners,” as they’re sometimes called, are pneumatic devices for euthanizing large livestock. Big meat plants employ two basic kinds, penetrating and non-penetrating. The penetrating ones are more popular, especially in the U.S. (and Hollywood—this is Chigurh’s choice, and one was also used in the 1997 film The Butcher Boy). The non-penetrating type, though less precise and harder to operate, is big in Europe, because no blood-and-brain spillage means no chance of mad-cow disease.

Here’s how a stunner works:

• The muzzle of the gun is placed against the forehead of the “subject”—cattle, goats, sheep, or (in No Country’s case) a hapless motorist.

• The trigger is pulled.

• Pressurized air—stored in an attached tank weighing some 20 pounds—pushes the pointed bolt, usually about 3 centimeters long and 1 in diameter, out of the muzzle and into the subject’s forehead.

• The bolt goes through the skull, damaging or destroying the cerebrum and part of the cerebellum while knocking the subject unconscious and/or dead.

• At the same time, the brain stem is left intact, which means the subject’s heart keeps beating for a while even as internal bleeding occurs, which is necessary to prevent meat spoilage.

• The bolt then retracts back into the barrel of the gun.

According to Temple Grandin, an animal-science professor at Colorado State University who also designs livestock-handling facilities, most U.S. plants have four stunners in operation at any given time. The technology, invented sometime in mid-20th-century Europe, caught on big in England and Germany before spreading to the U.S. Today’s versions are highly exacting, she says, with the best ones killing the subject 99 percent of the time on the first shot.

Nevertheless, animal-rights groups have cried foul and called these guns inhumane. Grandin scoffs. “That is just rubbish,” she says. “A captive bolt pistol works extremely well, provided it’s cleaned regularly. It’s a tool with precision machine parts, like a high-powered hunting rifle. And just like with a hunting rifle, if you don’t keep it clean, it won’t work. If you take care of it, it’ll work beautifully.”

As a film critic, though, she has her doubts: “The killer uses a captive bolt pistol? That’s just stupid. He’d have to carry around that tank, all that air … Using a Koch magnum [a smaller stun gun] would make a lot more sense. That’s just stupid.”

It’s a cavil that’s been voiced by professional-critic types, like the Washington Post's Stephen Hunter and the New Yorker’s David Denby (though others still, like the New Republic’s Christopher Orr, have taken an opposing view).

While all that’s probably best settled by a critical rumble in the alley, it’s interesting to note that the sound made in the movie came not from an actual captive bolt gun but from a pneumatic nail gun. “I wasn’t looking for authenticity, so I didn’t even research cattle guns,” sound designer Craig Berkey recently told the New York Times. “I just knew it had to be impactful, with that two-part sound, like a ch-chung.”

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