You often hear warnings about firing guns straight into the air. The danger stated seems to be that it could kill someone coming down. I question whether this is true. Is the terminal velocity of a cartridge fired straight up and then coming down, sufficient to penetrate a human skull or any other part?
I hope someone with a physics background can calculate how high the bullet would go before zeroing out and falling back to earth and at what velocity. Then a ballistics expert could say whether that in fact could kill anyone:confused:
My WAG but I would guess that the terminal velocity of a bullet is fairly high. They have a small x-sectional area and are aerodynamically designed to move quickly through the air.
Forgetting wind resistance for a second, the bullet will travel upward, decelerating at about 32 ft/s/s until it reaches its zero velocity. It will then accelerate downward at 32 ft/s/s until it hits its terminal velocity or a human skull. (32 ft/s/s or 9.8 m/s/s is acceleration due to gravity). I suspect that wind resistance would be negligable somy guess is yes.
A sort-of related thread is available here
A few years back as New Year’s Eve approached, National Public Radio aired a report on the problem of cretins firing guns into the air at Midnight. I distinctly recall that it was said this was a particular problem in California, with it not being uncommon for several fatalities to occur in a given year.
Unsurprisingly, Cecil has the scoop on Can a bullet fired into the air kill someone when it comes down?.
It has the potential to be fatal.
My little brother shot a 30.06 through the roof of our mothers house when he was about 12. The bullet exited the roof and about 30 seconds later the bullet came back down through the roof. When fire, he was in a second floor bedroom, the bullet came back down about 12 feet away, went through the roof, ceiling, second floor/first floor ceiling and lodged in a phone in the kitchen. The phone worked just fine despite the hole in the top and was used for many more years.
B-52’s used to drop whole loads of bullets with little fins on them over the jungle in VN. Not much lived on the floor of the jungle that was in the path of the dropped bullets.
Can I see a cite for that GusNSpot? I’m interested in reading more about it, I don’t doubt you.
I’ve seen it. This is also the reason why police don’t fire warning shots anymore, because the bullets come down and liability is too much. Rarely does it happen that the bullet hits the shooter, but they frequently strike others.
Years ago I had a handful of those things. They looked like little lead “bombs” with sharp steel fins on one end. I bought them from Jerryco (now sciplus.com), and the catalog said they were dumped out of planes, I think during WWII.
As for lethal bullets, I remember that this problem was discovered in the 1980s in LA. Some doctor saw a couple of injuries where people were shot in the top of the head. He wondered if this was from falling bullets (apparently lots of gunfire in LA), so he went through some hospital records. Apparantly there were many injuries and even deaths from people getting “shot in the top of the head” by unseen assailants. The explanation was obvious, but nobody had realized that it was so common.
I’ve got one, too. Imagine a tiny lead bomb, about an inch and half long, with razor-thin sheet metal fins.
Nasty.
In the absence of wind resistance, there is no “terminal velocity.” Falling objects keep speeding up until they hit something. An atmosphere limits the speed at which things fall; exactly what that limit is depends on weight, cross section, air density, etc.
Many years ago, a woman in Akron, OH was killed by a bullet originating as a warning shot by a policeman. I know this story to be true, because the woman’s wake was taking place at a funeral home my dad was doing work for at the time.
From what I remember of my basic physics classes, the velocity of the bullet on the way down should equal the velocity when it was fired if we disregard wind resistance. Wind resistance seems to have a significant effect though.
http://www.loadammo.com/Topics/March01.htm
That’s an old unsophisticated study though. Not sure how modern improvements in bullets/testing methods have changed the situation.
Not to pick on you too much DreamWorks but this line finally inspired me to post. This is a big planet and for all of the probably hundreds of thousands of bullets discharged into the air a handful of them come down on a human being. This is hardly frequently
I am amazed none of the folks much better at ballistics than myself haven’t pounced on this thread.
IIRC Corolis force will not effect the * vertical component* of a vector but it will effect the horizontal component. So a given bullet will not land in the same spot but on the scale of a typical rifle bullet probably within 10m or so. Not my idea of a good place to stand.
Even so a circle with a 10m radius has an area of roughly 300 square meters. Your body occupies about 1 of those square meters. So its not a good idea but at 300:1 odds its definitely betting odds that it wont hit you. So if Bubba drags out his huntin’ rifle to pop off a few celebratory rounds, because he heard Martha Stewart is going to jail, the chance of them falling on someone even in heavily populated areas is probably close to one in hundreds of thousands.
Corolis is a major issue in long range artillery. The targeting solutions for even WWII era naval gunnery accounted for this to make their fire more accurate since with flight times of 10-15 seconds the shot could deviate as much as 30m from this. 30m is a big deal when you’re talking about hitting something thats only 20-30m wide. In the example cited below by CarnalK I would be willing to bet many of those bullets drifted much further than 30m. Although the article did cite 1% of them falling in rather close proximity it also noted
Speed of falling bullets.
For comparison, painball guns fire at muzzle velocities right about 300fps so yes falling bullets would hurt like hell and a portion of them will penetrate (since they are solid slugs not frangible paintballs) anyone who has taken a paintball hit at close range on bare skin can tell you 300fps is far from pleasant. A typical 9mm pistol bullet has a muzzle velocity of right around 1,000fps well over triple the amount of force behind that paintball, with a much higher surface to weight ratio.
Those nifty little fin stabilzed bomblets (seen one but don’t own one) were so effective because they were dropped en masse and they are stabilized the fins keep them in optimum orientation for high terminal veloocity. A randomly fired bullet, especially near the peak of its flight where its velocity is very low, will be subject to alot of wind shifting and irregular resistance on its surface normally overcome by brute force in firing at shorter ranges.
So with all of the millions of forces acting on the event in question, the chances of any given bullet fired into the air by a reveler actually seriously injuring someone is probably close to one in a million. Maybe we need an insurance actuary to figure out a policy that will only pay out for $100,000 only for being injured by falling bullets. I bet its dirt cheap:D
Not to pick nits (well maybe, but without malice 
) I think the bullet has a lower surface to weight ratio.
I also think the 300:1 odds is a good (conservative) approximation of the odds of hitting a specific person, if you’re in a town square filled with a bunch of other yahoos, even if you were the only one firing, you might almost expect to hit someone. Bubba in his backyard is less likely to hit someone, but with all the Bubba’s out there, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that he did.
So what’s the positive result from firing into the sky? Maybe that 1 in 300 will be an armed robber who would otherwise escape unscathed? :rolleyes:
I sure don’t want to be the one clobbered by Cecil’s 2X4.
I wonder how the neighbors of these guys vote on gun control issues.
Peace,
mangeorge
I am reminded of the woman’s high heel pressures … (never mind, not a hi/jack) I got no site, just military experience, did ever think about proving or dis-proving, just part of the scene…
Think dart - arrow - bullet - dust particles in space when closing speeds get high, will put holes in glass without cracking I have heard… No cite… just food for thought…
I was kinda hoping someone would first do the calculation of how high the bullet would actually go fired straight up. I E muzzle velocity deceleratingat 32 ft/sec/sec etc
Armed with this height and basic velocity formula; then determine velocity on impact or terminal velocity if that is achieved. This may answer the question w/o further speculation. If the terminal velocity is about 300 feet per second (and I don’t know that it is) I would guess that it might injur but would be unlikely to be fatal.
The other part of this is the incredible odds against being hit by anything. Basic calculations of surface area of the bullet/ available area (defined even as a fifty meter circle)/ the area of ones head and shoulders as exposed from above would seem to dictate that millions and millions of bullets would have to be fired to account for the REPORTED accounts of these wounds.
Any statisticians want to take a crack at the odds? Assume South Los Angeles (notorious for gunfire) as about one hundred square miles and the population as one million. One person for every 310 square yards approximately. Thats the size of a small house lot measuring 30 feet by 93 feet. The area of the body exposed to the overhead is no more than two square feet(one foot front to back and two feet wide). The chances of being in an affected area would then be about 2/2790 (size of body divided by size of yard. And this is just the random part. Now lets say that the instance of vertical gunshots per year is one thousand. I think you then one thousand by one million and multiply the result by 2/2790. This should then tell you the odds of a person being hit. It comes to one in 1,395,000. This statistic would tend to put the lie to claims of dozens of people being hit by vertical gunfire.Still higher than winning the lottery tho
I wish someone better at numbers than I am would scope this out (or tell me I am fairly close!
JP
I don’t think the important part of tekgraf’s question is how many get hit, but what happens to those who are. (hit)
What we need here is a cost/benefit analysis.
Cost: One 2X4 on the head.
Benefit: Zero.
Simple, no?