The first year is all pass-fail (strictly pass-fail, no honors). The second year is honors-pass-fail, but the grades are only tracked for AOA. P&S does not rank their students. The MS II's and MS III's I spoke with felt that this really does keep the "gunners" at bay (that includes one guy who was leaving the school after MS II because he realized he didn't like medicine; thus, he wasn't really trying to sell the school to me, b/c he didn't feel it was his job.)
On another note, judging by the comments from people on this site, everyone who posts here should be considered a "gunner" by everyone else. Everyone here is looking to get ahead in the admissions process. Most people here are competitive in school. Thus, by the SDN definition, everyone here is a "gunner". Furthermore, if this is how you classify "gunners" then they will be at any medical school you attend. So GET OVER IT and focus on what really matters in a school: facilities, location, curriculum, etc!
Sorry for the rant...
We all want to succeed and get into medical school. If that's your definition of gunner, fine. I don't mind people who set goals for themselves.
However, some people go beyond that, and that's what pisses us all off. There are the people who work really hard to show off their knowledge and put down others. They go to an ivy league school and make sure you know that they go to an ivy league school. They make sure you know that their school is ranked in the top ten or whatever. They scoff at people who didn't go to a world-famous college.
When you visit any med school, most students you meet will flash smiles, be eager to talk with you, and so on. That's part of how they got into med school--they have decent social skills (and the ones who don't have social skills aren't going to volunteer to talk to you). But we all know that in this profession, you have to fake being nice 24/7.
I'd say if you visit a med school and sense nothing's wrong with the students, that doesn't tell you anything. If you do sense something wrong, that should be a red flag.
That said, I didn't like Columbia at all when I interviewed there. They made a big deal about trying to denounce their reputation as the "College of Surgeons and Surgeons," and how "not everyone is from Harvard, Princeton, or Yale." When someone spends so much effort trying to denounce a reputation, you should wonder why the reputation exists in the first place and continues to do so. Don't be so quick to believe the student tour guides who charmingly say the reputation has no foundation. They're recruited to promote the school, they'll say anything to get you interested.
It didn't help that the two student tour guides were both from Harvard, interested in surgery, and talked the most about their surgery club. And from their class roster, I estimated 50% of the class is from an elite ivy league school. So technically, yeah, not everyone is from Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, but that's just getting silly.
And the people from my undergrad institution who went to Columbia were gunners: interested in going to an elite/top ranked school over anything else.
Yes, its up in a part of Harlem up at 168th but that' what subways are for. I got to meet a lot of the med students and you'll get your batch of uber competitive/ almost inhumane med students but there were way more of the super cool/normal type of students as well. 
