Shooting a gun straight into the air - a la New Years

Factual Questions
21

Well, the air around it up there has that velocity x+y, so that air would push it a
bit, especially at the top of its flight where it spends, relatively, a lot of its
flight. It might maintain a substantial fraction of that extra velocity all the way to the ground. You have to make some assumptions.

The effects are so small that the angle of the barrel, and wind, are the most important factors.

22
      • Hillbilly Science I Know Is True:
  • If you shoot just about any rifle or pistol upwards, the bullets will fall back down fast enough to (1) put holes in building -and sometimes autmobile- roofs, and (2) will be moving fast enough to likely cause injury, if the bullet strikes anybody. I wanna say it isn’t enough to kill, but if it hit the top of your head, I dunno. I have no cases to cite. You can’t throw a lead fishing weight hard enough to pierce the bodywork of a car, so that means the bullets are falling significantly faster than it is possible to throw them.
  • You can, however, shoot upwards with shotguns and the falling [bird, not buck, and for God’s sake not deer slugs] shot will not (1) put holes in building or car roofs (though it will leave marks on car paint) and (2) it will not injure you as long as it doesn’t hit you inna eyes -DON’T LOOK UP, DUMMY!- lots of kids and ex-kids around here have played this game (trying to land shot on each other); most of the guys I know have at least once. -And shotguns are better noisemakers anyway. But the police still cruise around and arrest people for firing guns into the air, because most of the people doing it are drunken morons in the middle of the slums and depressed areas. - MC
23

Hey! got some cites:
http://www.jointogether.org/gv/wire/news/reader.jtml?Object_ID=261424
http://www.sunherald.com/region/docs/party010200.htm
http://www.latimes.com/news/state/20000102/t000000469.html

Whaddya think? Cecil going to have to revisit this one?

.

24

Jeez, it’s raining bullets.
http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Jan/03/city/BOY03.htm

There’s supposed to have been another one in Kansas City.

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25
      • I do know that there have been instances of kids being killed after being shot with BB guns; one died of resultant infection of the brain after a head injury and another had a heart artery ruptured and bled to death after being shot in the back, near the spine. I don’t remember the other ones exactly (these I remember from airgunletter.net’s bulletin board). So, usually it takes a lot to kill somebody, but sometimes it takes very little. - MC
26

Yes, there was an incident in KC.
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/home.pat,local/3774203b.104,.html

27

There is a type of competition in archery called Turtle Shooting. You draw a huge bullsey on teh ground and try to hit the center by shooting straight up in the air.

The problem with shooting up in the air is that after you lose sight of the projectile, where should you stand. IT migh land where you shot it from, or it might land 10 feet to the left…or right. You sooon realize that wherever you are standing, you have (in your mind) a scary chance of getting hit. IF you must shoot in the air, aim out wards into unpopulated areas.

28

I cast another vote for no deflection due to the Coriolis force.

I looked it up in a physics book. You are really only concerned with the horizontal component of the Coriolis force, which is proportional to the local vertical component of the earth’s angular momentum vector. That vector points north (along the axis of rotation) so the local vertical component is 0 at the equator & 100% at the N. Pole.

You cross product this with the horizontal velocity component times -2m to get the horizontal Coriolis force component. In the Northern hemisphere, the object will be deflected to the right; to the left in the Southern hemisphere.

If you shoot straight up, you have a 0 horizontal velocity component, so no Coriolis force.