Firing guns in the air

[monty0703]

Watching the Iraquis fire their guns into the air yesterday got me thinking - what goes up must come down so where do the bullets land? Gravity obviously must bring them back down - has anyone ever been inadvertently injured?

[jenstar]

When a bullet is fired straight up, it is propelled by the force of the shot on the way up, and is slowed by gravity and air resistance (and a little bit of friction). It only starts coming down when the force of the shot has been overcome, so on the way down it is only falling under its own weight, just as if it was dropped by hand. Under these circumstances it is unlikely to do any damage.

[Quizmonster]

Click http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a950414b.html and a link will take you to a web-page with a detailed - and seemingly reasonably-scientific - explanation of the situation.

[bernardo]

I seem to remember that only a week or two ago, there was a report that a man was seriously injured by a bullet which had been fired into the air at a wedding celebration in er... Turkey, I think...

[Pinotage]

Yes - many times. Just this past week such an incident in the US was reported at a Klu Kux Kaln ceremony.

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Gregory Freeman, 45, fired a real pistol with live ammunition straight up into the air. It would appear that the Klan, always dismissive of the laws that entitled all citizens to vote and receive an education, also has little respect for the law of gravity. The bullet, having gone straight up in the air came straight down and straight through the head of Jeffrey Murr, 24. It went through his skull, leaving him in critical condition.

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Link to the story in the Guardian of 26/11/03 http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,36
04,1093160,00.html

[KEJ2000]

Actually, I DID hear yesterday that 4 people were [accidentally] killed and 60 were injured by the celebratory gun firing in Iraq. They said so on ABC News. I think that story wasn't emphasized just because the other events of the day seemed like "bigger" news at the time.

[KEJ2000]

This is also why it's illegal to drop a penny / coin from the top of skyscrapers or the Eiffel Tower, etc.-- because the penny will be travelling as fast as a bullet by the time it reaches the ground, and can go right through a person's skull if they are standing below. Don't tell me you've never heard this before, guys!!!!

[treaclefight]

all depends what height the bullet arcs and starts to fall, gravity does not mean that things falls at a uniform rate, they accelerate as they fall, so that penny falling vertically from the top of the empire state building is going VERY fast by the time it reaches ground level and can do alot of damage. the bullets in question have been fired at an angle to some degree so wont be falling 100% vertically and i think this slows them a bit (if you are au fait with velocities and masses and the like please confirm or correct that). to answer your question, those bullets do come down all over the place and sometimes people do get injured, a risk that maybe mad to us in the west but alot of what we do to make ourselves so miserable every day seems mad to them too so dont lose any sleep over it. if you were watching bbc news yesterday you'll have heard our girl in iraq being quite definate that she did not feel her life was at risk or that the situation was dangerous in a hostile way, carefully explaining that she was wearing a flak jacket to counter that precise risk of the random bullets falling on her. :-D

[darth vader]

It's all about the terminal velocity of the object, as to it's potential for fatality. Every object falling in air due to gravity, will reach a maximum speed beyond which it will stop accelerating, called terminal velocity (TV). the TV of humans varies according to how you fall - but in the skydiver formation, about 125-150 mph, whereas if you go head first it's about 200-230 mph.If you google the phrase "terminal velocity" you will get a few hypotheses on the bullet-coming-down-killing-someone theory (though annyongingly they all talk in metres per second not miles per hour)

[sddsddean]

Many years ago when I was at college, I took up small bore (.22) rifle shooting and trained to become a coach. During the course of our training we were told about a bloke in a Birmingham park who was out with his family having a picnic. Suddenly he slumped forward..dead. The Police couldn't work out what happened until a guy shooting pigeons wandered over to see what all the commotion was. He had been about half a mile away, missed the pigeon and hadn't even thought about where the bullet went. It went into the back of the blokes head!!