To the Very Bottom
Hilarious.
But as my report indicates, actually wrong. Sorry to spoil the brilliant joke, but several of the bullets used were severely fragmented several feet into the water, so you couldn’t even say that they traveled to the very bottom.
Thus does Science march in jack-booted fashion over Humor.
And the report that prompted this humorous interlude was How far can bullets travel when fired into water?
The Mythbusters did this, and that was exactly the result they got. They expected the high-velocity rounds to penetrate farther into the water than low-velocity rounds, but the speedy bullets simply shattered when they hit the water, despite the copper jacket. The jacket simply peeled off in shreds and there was nothing but lead crumbs recovered from the bottom of the test pool.
When did they start using ballistics gel to recover bullets for testing? In the old Perry Mason shows, they always just fire into a tank of water. The tank they showed was quite small, so you’d have a problem with a bullet that could travel eight feet in water deforming on striking the side of the tank. How expensive is the gel? Can it be reused at all?
As nearly as I can remember, the old way of getting bullet samples for comparison was with cotton, not water. And ballistics gel isn’t normally used for that purpose – it’s used for answering questions such as, “What does this bullet, fired under these conditions, do to typical human flesh?” and “Given that this bullet travelled this far into the flesh of the victim, how far away was the shooter?”
(“Ballistics” is from a Latin word for “catapult”. It covers all scientific areas having to do with non-guided missiles of any sort, from pistol bullets to intercontinental missiles that rocket up, and then fall down. Identifying bullets is one kind of ballistics; so is calculating what upward angle you have to shoot a cannon at to have the shell come down at such-and-such a distance.)
Wasn’t it in Naked Gun that a ballistics expert fired shots end-on through a shelf-full of videos of some series? “See, Frank, the bullet from this gun penetrated through seasons one, two three and four, and only came to a halt in episode 7 of series five” - or words to that effect?
Anyway, yes, I also recall cotton being generally used in ballistics testing, at least for examination of rifling marks to match the bullet to the gun.
That’s not how they did it in the Wikipedia of forensic science, CSI!
They fired into a water tank for rifling marks and gel for human comparison.