The answer, as with all things engineering, is…it depends.
Any individual hole in the skin, not hitting anything structural, will just let the air out. Pilots have oxygen masks. At altitude, the loss of pressure will cause a fog to form, but that’s it.
Make a lot of holes, especially together, and you could get a section of skin to peel off. Still look at Aloha Air. This plane landed safely with only one fatality, the flight attendant that got sucked out.*
Put a round through the engine, or both engines, or any critical system and maybe you can bring the plane down. Put one through the pilot’s head, and you have a real problem.
I’m very sorry that some rat complained to you about old harmless jokes.
I’m sorry about the old ‘Gold Finger’ joke.
I’m very sorry that Gert Fröbe accidentally shared a face with the single most ignorant and corrupt president of our lifetime.
I’m sorry that the old Winston Churchill joke about how pilots must adjust for change in weight and airspeed should he accidentally fall out of the plane could be seen as a threat to a president of such low quality.
I state for the record that since all I do is sit in my home, occasionally shop, do housework, and on occasion sip wine… that there is absolutely no threat from me to that fascist, small-handed, vulgarian Son-Of-A-Bitch.
If Trump wants more of an assurance than that, he may feel free to hie his fat orange ass into his truck-suspension golf cart, drive on by, and knock on my door.
( I said ‘knock’, you centaur leaning pumpkin-headed bastard. You’re not welcome inside. )
Sorry that I had to waste your time, Miller. I know that you have better things to do.
[Moderating]
This response indicates that you do not understand the seriousness of your infraction. Consequently, I’m upgrading the previous note to an actual warning, and banning you from further participation in this thread.
If you have any other issues with the board moderation, take it to ATMB.
[/Moderating]
I’m not sure where the failures were here. The only two times I have ever fired a gun of any kind were on skeet shooting ranges. And safety is #1 in those places. The guy with the gun was probably a complete idiot, but also there should have been some oversight. “unsafely fired in the wrong direction” That’s inexcusable, and lawsuit material.
Wouldn’t be the first time. Decades ago I read of a bird hunter who leaned his shotgun against a fence post in order to climb the fence. His retriever came bounding up, knocked it down and it fired in the wrong direction.
Whenever you leave your gun somewhere (e.g standing against a fence), you should make sure it can’t fire. If a bolt action, open the bolt. If a semi or pump action, empty the chamber. If a break action, break it.
If you dont, you don’t deserve any compassion for being stupid when you should’ve known better.
A gun assembled from parts not necessarily tracked, licensed or registered. Often from 3D printed parts. Basically untraceable and therefore unaccountable.
The explorer John Hanning Speke died that way. He was climbing over a fence and leaned his hunting gun on it. The Dictionary of National Biography says he “mishandled” his gun. “Mishandled” is such an elegant word. Because nobody knows for sure if it was an accident or suicidal, though he had been depressed at that time.
The film Mountains of the Moon dramatized the event, showing first a closeup of Speke propping his gun against the fence, muzzle up, then starting to climb. Then a distance shot shows him catching the blast. So the film also fudged the question of whether it was suicide.
As BipptyBoppityBoo described, a ghost gun is what Luigi Mangione is accused of using in his assassination action. Handguns are slightly more regulated in the US and a tad harder to obtain. Ghost guns provide idiots with a way to get them more easily, dispose of them more easily after criminal use, and, being mostly plastic, somewhat harder for security systems to detect.
Minor correction, and admittedly the article isn’t clear. Ghost guns are first and foremost, any gun created without the government mandated serial number (most frequently the receiver) and therefore not tracked as a “firearm”. They can be assembled 99% from legal, off the shelf “kit” parts, with just the one element secured through less than licit means. They can also be partially or fully 3D printed, though the materials are in general not of sufficient strength for safety or repeated use. Another class of ghost guns is where the entirety (or just the receiver) is manufactured by any number of persons with metalworking tools and a pattern, which are, sadly, very common among private shops, and the patterns themselves are a grey area.
So ghost guns run through a huge rain, from 3D printed zip guns that are likely to blow up without warning, OEM gun parts with one tiny illegally sourced section, or fully manufactured from the ground up by skilled metal workers who hand them out to friends/families or worse, sell them as a side business.
And @running_coach is correct, other than the most extreme versions of the first category, they’d all show up on any decent security screening.
And a common item in the US gun market has been the “80% kit” which as it says, means about 4/5ths of the fabrication of the receiver/frame is already done at a factory but it still requires a little more shop work to finish it before you can add the parts that make it an operational firearm.
Now, sure, if you do that, you are supposed to then put a serial number on it.
