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@miller Stomach/abdomen stabs are tricky. In order to be a fairly quick death, you need a couple things to happen. Massive loss of blood, direct damage to heart/lungs, or damage to the brain. Basically anything that will very quickly prevent oxygen from reaching the brain and other vital organs.

A wound to the stomach area (what we think of as the stomach) is actually pretty unlikely to insta-kill someone. That area has blood vessels, sure, not no major veins or arteries to sever and cause catastrophic loss of blood. It holds no vital organs, mostly what we think of as guts: digestive stuff. Sure there are kidneys and a liver and stuff like that in the area but they’re closer to the rib cage area than the soft abdomen.

Stab wounds to the abdominal area will not bleed someone out quickly or damage super vital organs but it WILL cause something super nasty: sepsis. Basically (grossness ahead) stomach acid, undigested food, and fecal matter that are all usually held safely in the digestive track are allowed to get into the spaces between organs when stabbed repeatedly in that area. All that nastiness will basically damage the cells lining other organs and slowly rot someone from the inside (sorry again for grossness).

So in short, when you see someone get stabbed in a movie in the stomach area like Heath Ledger’s character in The Patriot and they die 5 minutes later, that’s movie magic to drive the plot. If a modern guy/gal gets seriously shanked, they’d get rushed to an operating room and a surgeon removes grossness and repairs intestinal walls. Pretty survivable as long as that nasty stuff isn’t allowed to sit for too long.

Hope this helped and didn’t gross you out too much!