Here’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a while now. On the news programs on TV I very often see people, (men usually) shooting rifles into the air to celebrate something or protest something. Usually in the news about the middle east.
Isn’t this dangerous? Doesn’t what goes up have to come down? Do the bullets disappear? Burn up on re-entry?
Why aren’t there casualties on the ground?
thanks eric.
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Ok, thanks, I have just read that article from the link. It still doesn’t give any exact answer. It would seem, and this is based on watching news programs on TV, that there are a multitude of these guys in the middle east shooting into the air and we NEVER hear of casualties resulting from this activity.
It would seem that if they were injuring (or killing) their own people, they would probably desist from this behaviour, but we never hear of casualties from one of these celebrations, at least I haven’t.
So I’m still wondering why or why not. Naturally the bullet on its downward trajectory does not have muzzle velocity, but gravitational velocity (I can imagine a place in space where the buillet reached its maximum height and just stands still for a fraction of a moment before faling back down, but this velocity would still cause damage to the soft human biological machine which is more or less a water bag enclosed by thin leather.
Yes, returning bullets are easily capable of killing a human being. Firing a weapon into the air at random demonstrates an intense disregard for human life. Either that, or an incredible ignorance of the function performed by the gun being shot.
Yes, like Zenster, I agree (for what it’s worth) that a bullet fired into the air would most likely be capable of maiming or killing someone back here on the ground.
So I guess I will redefine my question to be:
Why is it that on the news we never hear of casualties caused by these AK-47-istic celebrations in the wide open streets? It would seem that if casualties were caused, then western news media would jump on this event to report the evidence of the harm done by wild-eyed radical extremist non-rational zealot behaviour on the part of Islamic hotheads bla, bla, bla.
eric
Islamic controlled regions (or any others plagued by “festive gunfire”) are not particularly famous for their extensive, Pulitzer prize nominated reporting.
Because this would barely be considered newsworthy for the local news.
Besides, the purpose of Western media is not to portray Islam as a nation of crazies.
Most people generally recognize shooting your gun randomly in the air as a hugely irresponsible thing to do apparently unless you happen to be from an Islamic nation, East LA, or Texas.
The odds of a bullet hitting someone is very small. Even if you look at a densely populated area with a million people in ten square miles, there’s less than a 1% chance that the bullet would hit where a person is.
Probably the reason we don’t hear about this is that in the rare cases when things like this happen people have no idea where the bullet came from.
It’s not a chance people should take, in any case.
I seem to remember an incident where many rifles were shot into the air on the occasion of some country’s independence celebration… lots of people packed into a small area like a town square or some such. Bangladesh? Sri Lanka?
Every year around Jan 1 in the Philadelphia, PA, USA area local news stations do reports about shooting guns in the air and they make an effort to discourage it. The past several years have seen death and injury from the gunfire as bullets come back down.
One year, several children were permanently disabled, and the Phila. police force is always raising awareness … doing interviews to get the word out…making visits to neighborhoods, knocking on doors.
Yes, they bullets come back…can harm people and property and some media do news pieces about it because it is a problem.
I remember reading that the shooting of guns into the air was made illegal during Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro because many were being injured and killed by the falling bullets. Over a million people pack into downtown Rio each night during Carnaval.
A falling bullet with 30 foot-pounds of KE will certainly kill a person if it hits the right spot. Bowhunters like me kill small game animals with blunt arrows at the same KE, and the arrow will easily penetrate a rabbit or a pheasant entirely, even if it hits a bone.
Does the probability of hurting somebody vary with firing angle? I mean, if the celebratory gunfire in a city was directed 0 degrees sideways through the neighborhood, or at only a small angle, distant people would occasionally be hit, same as with vertical shots.
With lots of houses around, I wonder if it’s far more dangerous to shoot randomly sideways, or more dangerous to shoot randomly upwards. Bullets shot sideways would have larger human targets, but they also would tend to hit barriers and not travel very far. Bullets shot upwards would have less chance of hitting a smaller human target from above… but there’d be many people out in the open on distant streets, and the same bullet shot sideways would have been quickly stopped by a building.
Perhaps the upwards celebratory shooting in dense populated areas is MORE dangerous than randomly firing a gun directly at neighborhood buildings.
New Orleans has (or had) a couple of really publicized deaths by celebratory gunfire a year. There were billboards up, reminders on the TV, all kinds of things.
I’m in Iraq working on a development project. I just hired a local assistant and he has a gunshot wound from “happy fire.” I knew of people in Kosovo who hadfamily members who been injured the same way.
I would tend to say that the “Joy-shooters” tend to shoot near- but not exactly - vertical. Supposing that they are part of a large crowd, the bullets will tend to go up (missing everything on the way), because their trajectory is steep enough, then later come down outside of the crowd because of the initial horizontal velocity component. Thus, relatively few injuries compared to what you’d get if they were shooting straight up.
And they get hit all the time anyway. Just doesn’t make the headlines.