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Mauser's making the distinction between straight up and parabolic fire, which was being discussed above. For a bullet to clip the shoulder and perforate the heart requires that it be impacting at a signifcant angle off vertical; a hit in the right shoulder which transsected the chest in such a way would be coming from a fairly flat trajectory, as opposed to a bullet fired straight up in the air, which loses a lot of destructive power. The current debate on the thread is the extent of that loss.
I don't know -where- you get this idea that people are trying to say it's safe. I have my own issues with the Mythbusters show, not the least of which is that they failed to recover most of the rounds they fired, which drifted considerably even when fired dead vertical. This did not permit them to get a statistically significant sample. Nobody here is argueing that this is safe, we're simply discussing the mechanisms by which it is dangerous.
The Mythbusters are good for a lot of things, and I like their show. But when it comes to guns, they're very hit-or-miss. Their double-bust of the "bullet throws badguy across room" myth was beautiful, as was the episode which dealt with bullets fired into water. However, they bungled the "bust" of Carlos Hathchock's Vietnam through-the-scope kill by using a modern scope with hardened glass, an intermediate cartridge (5.56mm) where Hathcock used a 30-06, and expecting the performance of the two setups to be identical.
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