flat5

We have all seen film of people shooting weapons facing up, in the outdoors.

These bullets come down. How powerful are they, say six feet above ground?

Hope this is the right forum for this question?

longbough

If there were no atmosphere then the bullet would come down with the same speed it left the barrel. In other words it's like being shot from above.

If you add atmosphere then that means drag from the air and wind. That would cut the speed of the bullet as it went up. It's probably not a huge factor since a bullet is designed to exhibit as little drag as possible.

While it's not as bad when there's atmosphere it's still bad news if you're hit.

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flat5

"While it's not as bad when there's atmosphere it's still bad news if you're hit."

Thanks for your reply longbough, but I guessed that much :-)

mixedmedia

I don't know how dangerous it is, but can we all agree it makes you look like a fool?

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Bill O'Rights

The first thing to realise is that what goes up, usually comes down. The bullet will come down, but it will come down more slowly. A bullet is fired at a typical muzzle velocity of around 2,700 ft. per second, or around 3,000 kilometres per hour. Once the gases stop pushing it, it begins to slow down due to two forces - the resistance of the air that it's pushing through, and the downward suck of gravity. Remember...gravity sucks.

Typically, a bullet will take around 30 seconds to climb to a height of around three kilometres, at which point it has reached its apex and has a velocity of zero. Then it begins to fall. As the bullet falls, it's subject to two forces...the suck of gravity trying to pull it faster, and the wind resistance slowing it down. The suck of gravity is not as powerful as the explosive gases that pushed it out of the gun barrel. So it will accelerate to a maximum speed of not 3,000 kilometres per hour, but somewhere between 330 and 770 kilometres per hour - depending upon the weight and shape of the bullet.

Now...a speed between 330 and 770 kph is obviously not as much as 3,000 kilometres per hour, but it's more than enough to penetrate your puny little human skull. You need a velocity of only around 220 kilometres per hour to do that. Son of a BITCH!!

So...if your New Year's celebrations include shooting a gun into the air...make sure that you are not in a metropolitan area 'cause you're gonna fuck up someone's holiday.

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healer

I remember a scene from a movie...can't remember the name or even the actors (maybe Johnny Depp?). It was set in Mexico and in the middle of some festival celebrations people were firing their pistols into the air. A little while later some dude caught a bullet on the way down in the head and died.

While I didn't fully believe it (I mean it's a movie) I couldn't completely discount it either. Thanks for layin' out for me, BOR.

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Cynthetiq

I have friend who was sitting on a plane flying from the south back to NYC. A bullet hit the plane went through his thigh and lodged in his head. He was hospitalized for several days in the local area where he was shot and the bullet is still lodged in his head almost 20 years later and has little to no effects aside from the trauma.

Some guy in a field tooks pot shots at planes flying overhead. It took the FBI some time to find the guy but they did eventually find him.

So what comes up does come down, if it doesn't hit something or someone flying past.

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zed wolf

Am I the only one around here that has seen this episode of MythBusters?
They conducted allot of tests including firing into the air and recovering the bullets after they returned to earth and decided its unlikely to be fatal to be struck by a returning bullet.

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Daniel_

The Mythbusters ep demonstrated that it could kill, but would require a very unlikely selection of things to happen.

So - possible, but unlikely - I think they left it as "plausible".

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The_Jazz

One thing to remember is that bullets still keep most of their lateral velocity, so shots that are off of vertical could still retain enough lateral energy to wound or kill (depending on the angle). A bullet fired at 75 degrees could easily retain enough energy to kill, although muzzle velocity is going to play a large role in that.

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The_Dunedan

The Jazz nailed this one. A bullet which goes straight up and falls straight down is not going to be going very fast. Most bullets, however, including those fired up in the air, are not going straight up and down, but in an arc. They won't stay supersonic forever, of course, but anywhere within their supersonic burnout range ( about 1,000 yards for most common rounds ) they're still quite deadly, and they retain the ability to kill ( if the bullet hits the wrong place ) out to several miles. There was a famous case about 4 hours from my Mom and Stepfather's shop, in which a 14-year-old girl waiting in line for an amusement-park ride, was killed by a 7.62x39mm bullet...fired over 4 miles away.

Dilbert1234567

Unfortunately, mythbusters had no spin to there bullets, which would have increased there terminal velocity, bullets fired up can kill, and if they don’t, hurt like a bitch. Not to mention its illegal most places, I hope everywhere. If your going to fire a gun, make sure you know where it will hit. Even though it may not kill an adult, it will still ruin there week, and would probably kill a child and most definitely kill an infant. And killing infants is never good.

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Acetylene

It is lethally dangerous. Unlikely to be a problem but lethally dangerous. The level of danger increases as the angle at which you shoot decreases, 90 degrees is mostly safe and it depends on the terminal velocity and shape of the projectile, 50 degrees is deadly, with many other degrees in between. Do you really want to find out where it starts being safe?

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monkeysugar

I believe it's "The Mexican." Good movie.

OP: Regardless of whether it can kill someone or not, it's an extremely irresponsible thing to do. What comes up, must come down and there's really no telling where it can land. "Always know what is beyond your target, and never point your weapon at anything you do not intend to destroy."

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MSD

Along the same line, bullets fired at a low enough angle can skip across miles of water and hit with potentially lethal velocity. My uncle mentioned something about someone being hit from across Long Island Sound (I think that's where it was) by a skimming rifle round a while ago, I'll have to ask him for more details

flat5

Thank you gentlemen, I consider myself informed.

shakran

We have to keep in mind here that the Mythbusters guys are special effects artists. . . Not peer-reviewed scientists. Their methods are often flawed. We can't take what they said about bullets as being 100% accurate.

KirStang

I read in Readers Digest, a resource I consider reliable, that a woman had a bullet fired in to the air go through her front door and puncture her lungs. So, though it may not necessarily be as lethal as a direct hit, bullets fired in the air must come down, and when they do, they will cause a certain amount of damage. Like Monkey sugar said, it's a really irresponsible thing to do.

Mauser

I think that we need to establish that there is a difference between volley fire and "up in the air" for a bullet to go through a door and hit a woman in the lung would require almost horizontal shooting, while "in the air" usually means 10-20 degrees from vertical.

Firing a bullet in the air is the same as dropping one from a plane, and not likely to be fatal unless you still have that soft spot in your skull from when you were a baby.

The_Jazz

And I think that point has been discredited above. Also, anything dropped from a plane would most likely be lethal if it hit you, unless that plane was flying into a severe headwind. Given the absense of wind, anything that qualifiies as a "plane" (i.e. not an ultralite) is going to be moving at a groundspeed of at least 110 mph (for a single engine in level flight). If a bullet (or more likely a nut from a screw) fell off of a plane and struck you on a windless day, the horizontal velocity would be enough to kill you if it struck your head. Clearly, wind will have a great effect on the object, but if the plane is flying with the wind, that effect will increase.

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Jolly Johnny

I can attest that, I'm a jet-fighter pilot, and during instruction we were shown what a coin would do if it fell from the plane in one of those rubber guys, and believe me, it would kill you.

cyrnel

Jazz, recall that bullet velocities are measured in units/second, not hour. Their very fatal velocities are affected by air resistance but in normal trajectory are still large enough to be life threatening at any point from the muzzle to the ground. OTOH, dropping one from low velocities (or the apogee of a bullet shot) becomes similar to the debate over a penny dropped from the Empire State Building. At any significant altitude, horizontal velocity becomes insignificant. The difference would be that a tumbling penny is relatively slow while a tumbling bullet may reach 100+fps. Ouch.

Some people take "up into the air" as straight up, others don't. That can account for the difference in assumptions. "Through the door" certainly doesn't sound like "up into the air", but whatever. Away from the classroom, and given my inability to drill a hole straight down into construction projects, I'd join you in the storm cellar.

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cj2112

Firing a bullet in the air in my presence is likely to cause the shooter to rapidly develop several gunshot wounds from my weapon. So I'd say it's fairly dangerous for the shooter*.


*This post not to be taken literally. I probably wouldn't shoot the person doing this, but I would certainly want to. More than likely I would notify the authorities and let them decide how to handle it.

Slims

People in the middle east die all the time from morons who shoot their weapons into the air.

However, I don't think a vertically fired bullet is the main danger. Rather, a bullet fired at an angle keeps a lot of it's energy. It goes up and falls down, but never stops moving sideways and retains some of it's initial horizontal velocity.

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The_Dunedan

There's also the fall position to consider; cylindro-ogival bullets like handgun rounds fall on their sides, while spitzers tend to fall tail-down. Most rifle bullets these days are spitzers, so they'd fall tail-first, which would cause less drag (and give higher sectional density on impact) than would a handgun projectile falling on its' side.

Edited to add:

Of course, this only deals with bullets falling straight down, but bullets fired at an angle to something similar; cylindro-ogival bullets will fall in a nose-up position similar to a landing airplane. Spitzers, at all but the most extreme ranges (for their respective loadings, that is) fall point-foremost. I think the nose-up degradation occurs somewhere shortly past supersonic burnout, but I'm not sure; Greg probably knows.

Dilbert1234567

The biggest problem with the myth busters segment was that the bullets may or may not have maintained there spin. at the apex, the kinetic energy would be zero, but the rotational kinetic energy was unknown, if it was small, the spin would dissolve into a random falling bullet, however, if it was still large enough to maintain spin, it would be more aerodynamic and could reach a higher terminal velocity.

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analog

I guess no one remembers the KKK guy who shot his gun in the air during a clan rally in 2003 and it came down and went through the skull of another guy...

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/South/11/...initiation.ap/

How he lived through that is beyond me. One lucky sonofabitch. The fact of the matter is, it went through his skull- proves deadly force.

G5_Todd

i saw something on myth busters about this....basically the conclusion they came to was that when the bullet came down it would not be fatal

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SirLance

They can be fatal. We have a law in Arizona called Shannon's law, named for a tennage girl (Shannon Smith) who was killed by celebratory gunfire in June of 1999. Article here.

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Deltona Couple

HOW DANGEROUS IS IT??? ANYONE who fires a gun into the air without a specific target (read a BIRD or other animal) should be shot themselves! It is VERY dangerous! and most likely leathal. I didn't see the episode on "mythbusters", but I can tell you that they are wrong in the MAJORITY of all air-fired gunshots from what I have read in this thread. There have been HUNDREDS of cases over the past years showing how many people die from these RECKLESS shootings in the air. I will look up more later, but here is a start...

People often celebrate by firing guns into the air without realizing that this can cause serious injury or death. 2 Bullets fired into the air during celebrations fall with sufficient force to cause injury and death. 1 The mortality rate is significantly higher than for all gunshot wound victims in general because the patients are usually hit in the head. 2 The injuries could also be caused by the bullet hitting the causality directly as showed in this case report. Events are often celebrated with fireworks and bonfire. Salutatory gunshots are often restricted to military celebration. In Nigeria especially in the western part guns could be fired during celebrations like burial, coronation and chieftaincy, wedding, traditional festivals, hunters' festivals, victory in political elections, and at political gathering. Gun shots are also fired during Christmas and New Year celebrations. In Puerto Rico, where Christmas and New Year celebrations are common, news media reports have indicated that approximately two persons die and an estimated 25 more are injured each year from celebratory gunfire on New Year's Eve. 1

References
1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). New Year's Eve injuries caused by celebratory gunfire--Puerto Rico, 2003. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2004 Dec 24;53(50):1174-5.

2. Ordog GJ, Dornhoffer P, Ackroyd G, Wasserberger J, Bishop M, Shoemaker W, Balasubramanium S. Spent bullets and their injuries: the result of firing weapons into the sky. J Trauma. 1994 Dec;37(6):1003-6.

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Mauser

OK, what are you calling up in the air? Straight up or volley fire. Because nobody is debating that volley fire is in fact dangerous and possibly fatal. If you watched the mythbusters show on this you would have seen what a falling bullet does, because that's what they did. They shot bullets into the air then retrieved them.

The 9mm, and the .30-06 all landed on their sides, and had the same impact craters as bullets dropped from a few hundred feet, which they deemed not-fatal. And the difference between throwing something out of a plane at a few hundred (or thousand) feet and off of a 5 floor building is pretty much the same as most objects reach their terminal velocity pretty fast and lose their sideways movement almost as fast.

Deltona Couple

So mauser, what you are saying is that the 15 year old girl that dies in Orlando, where they traced the bullet to a gun fired from a neighborhood nearby DIDN'T strike her in the top of her shoulder, penetrating her chest cavity, and rupturing her aorta, is in fact false? WOW! how forensic science has proven that a bullet fired in the air is lethal has been disproven by a bunch of missfits on a TV show... Sorry, but I put my faith in forensics, not Mythbusters.

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The_Dunedan

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.

MSD

A big issue I had was that they didn't take into account the fact that those that were fired straight up an were not recovered could have kept going in a parabolic arc, yet they stated conclusively that straight up couldn't kill.