Not sure if I'd recognize it or not, since most of my experience around guns has been in a range with hearing protection on, which changes the characteristics of the sound, obviously.
Context has been discussed extensively, but I think the other piece of the puzzle is frequency. The odds of something being a gunshot are much lower, outside of a war zone, than it being anything else.
So combine context and exposure to the sound, with the unconscious understanding of the odds that it could be a gunshot, and it only makes sense that people would think it's something different.
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