Posted on 08/13/2017 1:36:45 PM PDT by marktwain
Image from the Shillong Times
Celebratory gunfire is dangerous. Those who engage in it may not consider where their bullets will land.
Thirteen year old Noa Inman in Hammond, Indiana, was struck by a bullet on July 1st, 2017. He died from a wound to the head. Such clearcut examples are rare enough to become national news stories. From nbcchicago.com:
Noah Inman, of the 1600 block of 171st Pl. in Hammond, was pronounced dead at 2:06 p.m. Friday, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner's office.Surprisingly few deaths from celebratory gunfire are listed in the wikipedia article. The wikipedia article lists about a dozen "notable incidents".
To the primitive mind, guns are a toy status symbol that is fun to make noise with. These are adult children with an average IQ one would call “retarded” when compared against similar ages Caucasians.
Sounds racist? Some facts are. Deal with it, cupcakes.
There is a skeet and trap range in Nashville that faces a major roadway about 200 yards away. Shotgun pellets don’t even reach the roadway.
A bullet fired in zero wind straight up will stop momentarily, begin to fall to earth and in 7 seconds or less reach terminal velocity owing to simple air resistance.
The highest speed the bullet will achieve by simply falling is maybe 10% or less or what it has emerging from the muzzle after the initial shot.
Any person killed by one of these those was either only extremely unlucky or unlucky and killed by a TOTAL IDIOT who couldn’t pull off even a proper celebratory gunshot (not shooting straight up, or shooting at an angle UP A HILL occupied by people fussy about their skulls, etc).
Rare in the U.S. perhaps. The second most dangerous time of the year when I was in Turkey was when the Turkish national soccer team won a match in the World Cup. When they made the semi-finals, falling bullets killed 13. We’d get Embassy alerts telling us to stay away from windows. One of the neighboring buildings always had a couple of guys out on the balcony firing an AK on auto after a soccer victory.
And owing to its angular velocity (spin), it will most likely come down base first.
Don't you be talking about Holder's peoples that way..........
What goes up, must come down. We were always told, when you fire a weapon, you better know where that bullet is going to end up.
Growing up, one of the older kids in the neighborhood had a launcher, and we would go to his driveway and shoot. This was in a neighborhood, and we were shooting directly towards a house less than a 100 yards away. These days such activity would be national news. I was too young to know what we were shooting...but considering I was able to do it when so small, it must have been bird shot and maybe even a special skeet gun. But still the notion of shooting directly at that house...contrasted with contemporary gun hysteria, amazes me.
Would the spin keep the bullet point first on the downward trajectory as long as there was even a slight deviation from the vertical?
Mr. niteowl77
You likely never hit the house-or if you did, there was no damage. A few months after I bought my first shotgun at age 14 I fired a load of #9 birdshot into my Grandfather’s pond in order to see the shot spread of the gun’s Improved Cylinder bore(gun was intended for quail hunting). It was almost comical at how large the spread was! After that I wasted more than a few boxes worth of bird shotshells firing straight up and then waiting for the tiny lead ‘rain’ to begin falling all around me...
For a slight deviation, probably not. In fact, the falling bullet would probably reorient itself to be perfectly vertical, base down.
Bullets in flight orient themselves in a way that all forces acting on them balance out. Drag is the biggest force, which explains why bullets typically follow a point first path -- it offsets the drag. You can overspin a bullet and it will keep it's attitude throughout its flight. Meaning it will keep the same angle relative to ground the whole way. Try launching a 40 grain .223 Remington from a 1 in 7 twist barrel. Many pistol bullets are overspun.
So are you saying that standing at sea level, if I fire my rifle straight up with a 3,000 fps muzzle velocity, that it will attain a terminal velocity of 2,400 fps?
I don't think so. There is no correlation between muzzle velocity and free fall terminal velocity.
So are you saying that standing at sea level, if I fire my rifle straight up with a 3,000 fps muzzle velocity, that it will attain a terminal velocity of 2,400 fps?
I don't think so. There is no correlation between muzzle velocity and free fall terminal velocity.
My math makes 10% of 3,000 fps into 300 fps.
But then I said “or less” so a more reasonable number would probably be 150 fps.
But the fact that there’s still residual bullet spin means the bullet is not tumbling, which would have another slowing effect, though we wouldn’t see uniform motion, i.e. the falling bullet would not speed up and slow down.
One man’s wedding celebration is another man’s rain of lead.
“A bullet fired in zero wind straight up will stop momentarily, begin to fall to earth and in 7 seconds or less reach terminal velocity owing to simple air resistance....”
But it will not land on the shooter - not even close.
Air is never still.
The atmosphere near the ground (below 15,000 - 20,000 ft above sea level, or so) is composed of many layers. They mix only a little, and often contain winds that blow in directions very different from adjacent layers. Temperature and pressure vary surprisingly: all these factors heavily influence the displacement of the bullet (or any object transiting a layer).
Terminal velocity of the bullet returning to earth also varies: temperature, humidity, barometric pressure vary greatly and all affect the air resistance the falling bullet encounters.
Greater uncertainty is introduced when a bullet traveling above the speed of sound loses velocity to the point where it drops below the sound barrier. Above the speed of sound, shock waves trail the bullet; when it goes subsonic, the shock wave dissipates. This affects the bullet in unpredictable ways and can cause it to veer unpredictably.
US Army Ordnance conducted experiments after the First World War to determine the maximum altitude attained by a US issue 30-06 bullet succeeded in recovering only a couple bullets out of many fired when the gun platform was aimed straight up. Maximum altitude was determined to be something above 9000 ft; these experiments were conducted on the Atlantic coast of Florida near Daytona, and details were set down in print by Julian S Hatcher, Maj Gen, US Army Ordnance, in _Hatcher’s Notebook_.
The TV series Mythbusters attempted to recover bullets fired vertically, from a launch site in the middle of a dry lake bed. They failed to recover a single bullet. Their calculations never took account of atmospheric layers and varying wind directions limited to layers.
Major General Julian Hatch, a U.S. Army firearms expert, did extensive testing on ballistics and falling projectiles in the 20’s. He calculated that .30 caliber rounds will reach terminal velocities of 300 feet per second (90 m/s) on descent, and determined that, while most bullets will leave a small dent in the ground when they land, that same bullet travelling between 200 to 330 feet per second can still penetrate human skin. The experience of many hospitalized and killed innocents validate his conclusions.The popular scientists on the TV show, Mythbusters experimented with the premise that “Bullets fired into the air maintain their lethal capability when they eventually fall back down.”
They found that a bullet fired straight up (an almost impossible achievement for a human), will tumble on its return trip and falls at a slower rate due to terminal velocity. In addition, they found that a bullet in this circumstance is therefore less lethal on impact. However, they also discovered that a bullet fired at a non-vertical angle will be able to maintain its speed enough to be very destructive on impact.
The non-vertical angle has to be significant for the retained velocity to be significant.
At about 40 degrees, the velocity at impact is a bit less than 600 fps for military, streamlined rifle bullets.
Everything else would be less than that, because they would have to travel through more air and lose more energy.
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