In Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut, a random shot fired into the air kills someone, and the shooter gets caught and tried for murder. Can this really happen? How fast is a bullet moving if you shoot it straight up and it comes back down? Some Pakistani friends of mine said that at some annual holiday (New Year’s?) many people shoot guns off into the air. Does this cause many injuries and/or deaths?
Yes, it does happen.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a950414b.html
This exact thing happened to several people when I lived in New Orleans. It was customary to fire guns in the air at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve and this sometimes had fatal results from falling bullets.
Basic physics tells us that a bullet travels in an arc, no matter which way its fired. So a bullet fired almost vertical will travel in a nice parabola.
More physics, tells us that as the bullet travels toward the top of the arc it loses kinetic energy and gains potential energy (that is it slows down), then at the very tip-top (im sure thats the sceintific term)of that arc the bullet stops then begins falling back down. As it falls it gains kinetic energy (speeds up) the same way it would if it was just dropped. So at the bottom its travelling as fast as when it was first fired out of the gun (assuming minimal air resistance) and a bullet at that speed is ineed quite deadly.
And just a little language nitpicking, if the bullet is dropping out of the sky, it is not “spent” (as in having “spent” its energy). A spent round is one that has bled off so much speed/energy that it is not capable of doing damage (although it might still be moving).
(Of course, any given writer can use the word any way his/her editor allows, so you may find the word “spent” being used to mean “missed its target.”)
Heavily edited from How Things Work:
Not very technical, but definitely a start. It also backs up Shagnasty’s mention of New Orleans.
If you read up on the battle of Fredericksburg, you will discover that a Union formation which was held in reserve within the town of Fredericksburg proper was decimated by a rain of spent bullets fired by Confederate troops from about a mile away along Marye’s Heights. Similarly, Wellington’s aides suffered heavily from spent bullets at Waterloo. One unfortunate gentleman had his lower jaw taken off by one.
However, others have had some less tragic experiences with spent bullets. There are numerous first-hand accounts of spent balls being stopped by sword scabbards, belt buckles, bibles, maps, and even clothing. It’s the ones that weren’t stopped in this manner which probably killed and wounded. Note however that this sort of spent ball has a different trajectory from that of an Osama bin Laden arrival ceremony, where the bullets are fired nearly straight into the air.
Google returned the following on “falling bullet”
Nine year old boy killed in Los Angeles.
http://www.channel2000.com/news/stories/news-990706-073634.html] in Los Angeles.
and a 22 year old in SFO
http://www.apbnews.com/newscenter/breakingnews/2000/12/29/gunfire_main1229_01.html] 22
But this site says that for .30 cal bullets the "disabling injury threshold of 60 foot pounds was not met. But this would still cause a serious injury. I bet that anything larger than 30 cal would be very dangerous though(think falling artillery)
See also
Provided that it is fired in a vacuum. A falling bullet has a terminal velocity of about 300 fps, give or take a few. That’s a big difference between muzzle velocity. Still though, some bullets, depending on their weight, can dish out enough damage to be lethal. The bigger the bullet, the larger the possibility of injury/death.
The shooter would probably be arrested for manslaughter. Presumably the intent was not to kill someone, however firing guns randomly in the air is incredibly irresponsible and would be covered under “criminal negligence” or some such thing.
Just out of curiousity, why would you think a person wouldn’t be killed or injured by a bullet fired randomly in the air?
The way I hear it, if a bullet is shot at you and instead of hitting you, it hits a tree behind you, then a spent bullet can kill you. I hear it can wait up to 30 or so years. It works best if the tree is in your own back yard.
After years of raking up leaves and pruning branches, you get so sick of the tree and decide to cut it down. This is when the chainsaw hits the bullet just right (Because the bullet was meant for you anyway) and hits you right between the eyes/in the heart/lung-whatever it takes but yes, a spent bullet can still get you. Why do you ask?
There’s a theme park near Charlotte, NC, named Carowinds. Roller coasters, rides, water park, etc. etc. etc.
In the late 70’s/early 80’s some f’king idiots were firing an illegially modified machine gun in a field nearby. The true indicator that they were f’king idiots was that they fired the thing up in the air.
One slug fell and killed a little girl in the water park.
Yes, they found the idiots and prosecuted them, but for simple manslaughter, IIRC.
I just live for the day when “stupidity” can be considered an aggrivating factor in a crime. Whoooops, Great Debate material there… (“I was too stupid to realize this was a bad idea.” “Well, then, you are also too stupid to walk around unguarded in my society; c’mon over here behind these bars where the rest of society will be safe.”)
I would maintain that a “spent” round is one which is travelling on a more or less horizontal trajectory has lost all or virtually all its kinetic energy, so that it is liable to be harmless when it strikes something.
In one famous incident during the Pearl Harbor attack, a spent .50 cal slug (presumably fom a US AA gun) crashed through the window of the Naval headquarters and struck Admiral Kimmel in the back–harmlessly–and then fell to the floor.
All of this seem flat unreasonable to me. The problem with the falling bullet that has been fired pretty much straight up is that at the apex of its trajectory is that it has lost all forward velocity and, presumably rotating stability. At that point it becomes a small, unstable, dense falling object subject to gradational acceleration but also subject to air resistance and buffeting by random air currents. Apparently a falling bullet can cause fatal injury but I have got to think such an event would be a fluke. Remember that a .30 cal. bullet is less than 1/3 inch in cross section and weighs well less than one ounce.
A bullet that still has some forward movement and stabilizing rotation is a different matter. I suspect that the stray bullet fatalities are unanticipated target hits or targets beyond conventional effective range of the bullets, not free falling hunks of lead. The muzzle velocity of a 30/06 round is, I think, some 2300 ft/sec. That means that if fired horizontally the bullet is going to travel almost 2300 feet down range (allowing for some air resistance) and will fall 16 feet off horizonal when one second out of the gun. At that point it will still be traveling pretty close to its initial 2300 ft/sec. My recollection is that with the M-1 rifle (30/06 cartridge) the aiming point for a 600-meter man size target is the top of the head for a body hit with sights set at 250 meters.
Not to be hijacking or anything, but on the subject of Carowinds, there’s a roller coaster there called the Carolina Cyclone or some damn thing like that. The frickin’ brilliant ride designers decided it’d be a good idea to bring the wooden stairs leading up to the entrance right up under the roller coaster. So any idiot waiting to get on the ride could simply reach up and put their hand directly on the rail of the track, ergo, crushed hands out the wazoo. Not talking about bullets, but still pretty damn stupid.
OK, I’m done with this slight hijack, carry on
I certainly wouldn’t want to get hit by a tumbling, 10-gram metal object traveling downward at a good 130 or so MPH. Doesn’t seem that getting killed by something like that would be much of a “fluke” to me.
Of course, I have the feeling a bullet would also travel faster than that. Terminal velocity for a human or like object is around 130 MPH, IIRC, but that’s an object with a SG of around 1. A bullet has an SG of what, 11, for a lead bullet? I’d imagine terminal velocity would be higher for a bullet, since it has a much higher mass-to-surface-area (and therefor, air-resistance) ratio. It’d be even higher if it were stabalized nose-first, but having already spent all it’s energy, I would think it would either tumble, or go aft-first, as bullets tend to do once they loose stabalization.
Yes, a bullet discharged in the air can fall and kill someone on the ground. It happens now and ten on the 4th of July, New Years Eve, and other times that morons discharge their guns carelessly in celebration, especially in urban areas, where the likelihood of a celebratory gunshot (what goes up [if it doiesn’t exceed escape velocity] must come down, sometimes leads to a bullet in the head of some poor individual who happens to be out and about.
As to what the miscreant moron can be convicted of…negligent homicide seems most likely to “stick.” But a vigorous DA might be able to make a 2nd Degre Murder charge stick, depending on the circumstances. First degree murder would be very hard to prove.