Is it possible to catch a bullet?

Factual Questions
1

Would it be possible to grab a bullet as it flew past you if you clenched your hand at the exact right moment?

Obviously you would need a lot of luck but is it theoretically possible?

ps I’m not aware of anyone who wants to shoot me just at the moment and, if I was, I would probably take some other (more reliable) course of action to avoid getting shot rather than hoping to catch the bullet but you never know when skills like this may come in handy.

2

Odds are it would just go through your hand. Don’t try it at home.

3

It would be easier to catch a bullet in your chest than in your hand.

4

I’m not talking about a bullet that is coming towards you!

I mean one that’s going past you. Could you kind of slap it down from above to take the forward velocity away and then grab it really quickly?

5

I can’t see it happening.
A bullet is traveling mighty damn fast. IF you could close your hand around it fast enough your in for a lot of pain.

Flesh and bone is not enough to slow the kinetic energy in such a short space. To stop the bullet traveling hundreds of feet per second would require a great deal of absorption of energy, which translates into a great deal of heat.

I would not want to volunteer to stop a bullet with a Balistic vest, no chance in hell would I try it with my bare hands

Best bet, learnn sly of hand, shoot a bullet into multiple phone books, dig out slug. Have someone(you trust) shoot past you, have previous slug palmed… do a dramatic dance, produce slug. amaze all your friends.
Try it in real life and an honorable mention on the Darwin Awards is a possiblity.

6

The smartass in me says: Only if someone tosses it to you, rather than firing it out of a gun.

The physicist in me says: Applying a downward force on the bullet has NO effect on the forward velocity. You must apply a force in the opposite direction of the velocity in order to stop the bullet. There is no part of your body that can apply that level of force (over such a small area) without being severely damaged in the process.

The only way to prevent the damage is to reduce the absolute level of force applied per square inch of your body (hand) below the damaging threshold. Bullet proof vests do this (somewhat) by spreading the force of impact over a wide surface, which is not an option when using your hand.

7

Also, wouldn’t the bullet burn your hand should you somehow miraculously grab it?

8
      • I doubt anybody can move fast enough to actively catch a bullet that wasn’t going to hit them anyway. Even the lowly .22 short is rated at 700 FPS out the barrel of a pistol. Now if the bullet was aimed at their hand, that’s a different story:
  • You could catch a .22 CB or BB cap easily in your bare hand. A .22 short might do some damage, but wouldn’t come close to going through your palm. A .22LR would do damage, possibly going through.
  • Also note that there are instances of people being shot with small-caliber handguns (such as .25’s and .32’s), and the bullets didn’t even penetrate enough to be fully obscured.
    ~
9

Also note that those tiny ceterfire rounds often have LESS energy than a .22lr.

10

Pshaw. Snatching a bullet out of midair is so easy that anyone can do it.

First, find a suitably tall skyscraper. Depending on the muzzle velocity of your gun, choose the appropriate floor. Now, send your accomplice down to street level and have him fire up along the building. Wait for the bullet to stop in front of your window and grab it.

Note that this may not work as well if you leave the shooter at the window and send the catcher down to the street.

11

As DougC says, a .22 bullet isn’t all that energetic, but as Dragonblink suggested, it would be hot.

Taking a little bigger bullet, say a .45 slug. A 250 grain bullet going 800 ft/sec has a kinetic energy of 432 ft-lb. This is equivalent to a 16 pound shotput passing you at about 20 mph. I think that would be hard to catch.

On the other hand, the kinetic energy of a 35 grain bullet traveling at the same speed is 60 ft-lb. This is the same 16 pound shotput going by at about 7.5 mph. Still pretty hard to catch.

12

Wouldn’t it be possible to catch it as the bullet were running out of forward movement? Meaning, you fire a gun, the bullet comes out and moves forward until wind resistance and gravity cause it drop to the ground.

13

By the time wind resistance takes enough of its forward movement away, gravity would have long since pulled it to the ground. The wind resistance slows down its forward movement, and gravity affects its vertical movement (assuming it was fired horizontally), but the two aren’t really related.

But wait - I’ve seen Penn catch a bullet in his teeth!

14
      • When I mentioned .22 bullets, I was only speaking about .22 rimfire bullets: a CB cap has around 36 ft-lbs of energy, a .22 short has around 70 ft-lbs, and a regular .22LR has around 125 ft-lbs (all from memory, not guaranteed correct…).
  • The weight of the bullet would have a lot to do with it: BIG bullets, like .444, 45-70’s and .458’s only need to be going ~350 fps to make kills on large North American game like bison and bears. -Which means basically, shooting halfway through the chest cavity of a cow. Your hand’s not going to slow a bullet like that bullet down much.
  • There’s a thread from wayback here asking about if one can catch a bullet in their teeth. There was a lady magician who did this stunt on a TV show, catching a bullet in a metal cup in her mouth. My feeling was that it was probably legit; of course there’s a million ways to fake this sort of thing on television but she did it at live shows, and the rifle used was -some- sort of .22 rimfire, so it wouldn’t have been very powerful.
    ~
15

Well, I caught a CO[sub]2[/sub] powered 22 pellet once, if that counts. It(or at least a large part of it) hit a rock at just the right angle to bounce high in the air, and come back to my hand. I guess the biggest difference(as other people have mentioned) is that it wasn’t powder fired and wasn’t insanley hot. But acording to the manuel it was fired about 520fps, so it wasn’t too much less than a powder 22.

16

Some bullets would be stopped by a finger (or more likely arm) bone, wouldn’t they? Or at least slowed enough that you can catch it on the rebound. Of course, it’d hurt too much for me to do it, but I bet its possible.

17

Don’t anyone try this! It’s only speculative:

Might it be almost possible if you “cheated” big time:

  1. Use a black-powder gun with a large, heavy bullet (large and heavy compared to the small and light load used to propel it, that is)
  2. Use a very small powder load
  3. Catch it wearing some special don’t-burn-your-hands gloves
  4. Have almost impossibly fast reflexes and incredibly good eyesight

So that then you’d have a big, highly visible bullet going much, much slower than even the most lame"real" bullets normally do. Then somehow see it coming and react to it in time to catch it without injuring yourhands —or the rest of yourself.

The idea is in essence to throw a piece of something that looks like a bullet but really doesn’t have the force or velocity of one in such a way as to make it possible to be seen and caught.

I would guess that more extreme cheating would be to rig a gun to fire something like a flash-bang blank while actually “shooting” a bullet with a spring or something like that so that it is travelling at safe and catchable velocities. The audience would be temporarily taken by the bang while the magician catches the spent bullet.

BTW, to simulate a spent bullet, you’d fire it into one of those forensic type water traps rather than through telephone books. In the latter case, it’d be massively deformed.
But all of the above defeats the spirit of the question in the OP.

18

Am I the only one here who remember the That’s Incredible! TV show where the guy came on and caught a bullet in his teeth? He had a little plastic/metal insert he held in his mouth and a guy shot the bullet and he caught it. Well, he bled a little but not much.

Jerry Seinfeld, I think since I have a comedy tape (Jokes to Go: Television) that doesn’t list credits for the comedians’ jokes, had a joke that went something like this:

Wasn’t that just the most incredible thing? The guy comes on TV and catches a bullet in his mouth. How do you learn to do that? What, do you toss him the bullet a few times and then say, okay Bob, this one is going to be coming just a little bit faster now. And the really incredible thing is, I don’t remember this guys name. He came on live TV and caught a bullet in his mouth and I don’t even remember his name. The guy must be thinking, man, what do I have to do? Come on live TV and catch a cannonball with my eye?

19

Somebody’s been reading Watchmen again.
William Poundstone, the anti-Cecil, discussed this in one of his books – Bigger Secrets, I think. Verdict: When someone “catches” a bullet, it’s a trick. Slight of hand. Don’t try it.

20

What if the bullet is fired underwater, and you stand at the extreme end of the bullet’s range?

Brian