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Stray bullet kills Amish teen in buggy

thebigsd

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Mar 23, 2010
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Quarryville, PA
Just another reminder to make sure your gun is unloaded before performing any kind of maintenance or cleaning. This is a tragic event that was entirely avoidable if it is indeed confirmed by ballistics testing.

http://usat.ly/vTi0vI
 
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Herr Heckler Koch

Guest
Sheriff: Ohio man cleaning gun killed Amish girl. The Impact of the Highly Improbable

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-12-20-17-50-11
FREDERICKSBURG, Ohio (AP) -- A man cleaning his muzzle-loading rifle shot the gun into the air, accidentally killing a 15-year-old Amish girl driving a horse-drawn buggy more than a mile away, a sheriff said Tuesday. [ ... ]The man had fired the gun in the air about 1.5 miles from where Yoder was shot, Zimmerly said. State investigators were checking the rifle for a ballistics match, he said.

Consider a semi-sphere with radius 1½ miles, the spherical surface area is 28.3 miles^2 = 7.9x10^8 feet^2. The hemi-sphere above ground is then 4x10^8 feet^2 and the semi-sphere towards a target from the muzzle is 2x10^8 feet^2 = 200,000,000 square feet.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+area+of+sphere+1.5+miles+radius

Let the whole target area be a 2 feet x 5 feet = 10 feet^2 area of that semi-sphere. The target area is 10/200,000,000 fraction of the possible ends of the bullet. That's a one in 20 Million chance. The shooter is really unlucky.

Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Learn Bayesian statistics on single event probabilities.
 

Ken56

Regular Member
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Oct 29, 2010
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368
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Dandridge, TN
Sad indeed

What on earth was he thinking by discharging his rifle up into the air? Granted, I am not familiar with the area and it may be as rural as can be but if he had to fire it to empty it then why not into the ground or into a hill? Atleast SOME kind of backstop.
 

09jisaac

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Louisa, Kentucky
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-12-20-17-50-11


Consider a semi-sphere with radius 1½ miles, the spherical surface area is 28.3 miles^2 = 7.9x10^8 feet^2. The hemi-sphere above ground is then 4x10^8 feet^2 and the semi-sphere towards a target from the muzzle is 2x10^8 feet^2 = 200,000,000 square feet.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=surface+area+of+sphere+1.5+miles+radius

Let the whole target area be a 2 feet x 5 feet = 10 feet^2 area of that semi-sphere. The target area is 10/200,000,000 fraction of the possible ends of the bullet. That's a one in 20 Million chance. The shooter is really unlucky.

Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Learn Bayesian statistics on single event probabilities.

I would have to disagree with your methods. But I see what you're saying. Both where unlucky and the chances of that happening was astronomical.
 

09jisaac

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Louisa, Kentucky
What on earth was he thinking by discharging his rifle up into the air? Granted, I am not familiar with the area and it may be as rural as can be but if he had to fire it to empty it then why not into the ground or into a hill? Atleast SOME kind of backstop.

Exactly, it don't matter how rural the area is it is still very irresponsible to shoot a rifle into the air.
 
H

Herr Heckler Koch

Guest
1/200,000,000 is the size of the odds in the current PowerBall lottery.

What precept of gun safety was violated? Cover with the muzzle that only which would be destroyed. "But he covered, aimed at nothing." No, he destroyed an angel.
 
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Fine

Regular Member
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Dec 20, 2011
Messages
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Location
Philippines
Too bad for the girl. She is indeed unfortunate. We might as well learn from this incident, no matter what the situation or the area is do not shoot your gun in the air.
 

Fine

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Philippines
The possibility is very small but there is a saying that " if it's not zero, it is still a possibility" no matter how small it is.
 

thebigsd

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Joined
Mar 23, 2010
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Location
Quarryville, PA
How does this thread have more posts than the one I started 7 hours ago on the same topic in the same sub-forum? Lol. I guess I'll see if a mod can combine them.
 

Steeler-gal

Regular Member
Joined
Oct 29, 2011
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Location
Fairfax County, VA
Since it is a physical impossibility to clean a chambered firearm, one has to wonder about this incident.

I'm wondering too. If he fired into the air how come he didn't fire UP into the air? Wouldn't he at least have to have fired straight forward for this happen? It just sounds very off. I feel badly for the young girl and her family.


Sent using Tapatalk
 

sraacke

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Jul 20, 2008
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Saint Gabriel, Louisiana, USA
Since it is a physical impossibility to clean a chambered firearm, one has to wonder about this incident.

There's nothing to wonder about. He wanted to clean a black powder rifle. To do so he needed to clear the chamber. As you pointed out, you can't clean it if it's loaded. So, being a black powder rifle, as opposed to something like a bolt action with a cartridge which could be ejected in one piece, he started the cleaning process by taking the gun outside, charging it and firing it. That effectivly emptied the chamber. This is probably something he's done a hundred times before with no problems. Once he fired the gun the air he went back inside to clean the rifle. The bullet went on it's merry way until hitting the girl.
As for questions about firing UP or into the ground, I'm not sure the weather conditions but being OHIO I wonder if the ground was frozen and if shooting inot frozen ground would have resulted in a ricochet and sent the bullet into a simarly unknown direction. Firing UP would still result in a bullet falling somewhere unknown.
This was tragic in so many ways.
 
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H

Herr Heckler Koch

Guest
A simple Bayesian analysis yields a 45° as a objective naive prior. Subjective priors would be 0° or 90°, leading to a conclusion that the event did not occur, while the media would have us believe that it did, indeed, occur.

Now we have a suggestion of an initial ballistic angle of 45° and a final distance of 1.5 miles, who knows enough about black-powder ballistic capability to estimate the terminal energy of the bullet? What are the chances that its final energy was sufficient to have the result published?

The 45° and 1/20,000,000 comes also from a Monte Carlo simulation using all publicly released information. Come on, who is an expert to validate my estimations or to provide better accuracy?
 
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SouthernBoy

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Western Prince William County, Virginia, USA
There's nothing to wonder about. He wanted to clean a black powder rifle. To do so he needed to clear the chamber. As you pointed out, you can't clean it if it's loaded. So, being a black powder rifle, as opposed to something like a bolt action with a cartridge which could be ejected in one piece, he started the cleaning process by taking the gun outside, charging it and firing it. That effectivly emptied the chamber. This is probably something he's done a hundred times before with no problems. Once he fired the gun the air he went back inside to clean the rifle. The bullet went on it's merry way until hitting the girl.
As for questions about firing UP or into the ground, I'm not sure the weather conditions but being OHIO I wonder if the ground was frozen and if shooting inot frozen ground would have resulted in a ricochet and sent the bullet into a simarly unknown direction. Firing UP would still result in a bullet falling somewhere unknown.
This was tragic in so many ways.

After I posted this, I learned that the long gun was black powder. You still cannot clean a chambered gun, but one does have to wonder what this guy was thinking. When I lived in Arlington, VA, I had a large hardwood tree stump, nicely sawed and smoothed that I kept in my basement. From time to time, I would fire rounds into it, since I was reloading back then, and I never had a problem... even up to .44 Magnum. So one has to wonder why this guy didn't have something like that or some other device, like a real bullet trap, with which to fire off a load before cleaning his gun.

God rest and keep the soul of the young girl who suffered at the hands of this man's folly.
 

G22shooter

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Mar 24, 2011
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250
Location
Concord, North Carolina
It just serves as an example of a rule I was given in training classes -- "There are NO misses. A bullet may not hit your intended target, but every fired bullet hits something."
 

PavePusher

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Apr 26, 2007
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1,096
Location
Tucson, Arizona, USA
Whenever I read of incidents like this, I pound my head in frustration while wondering WHY AM I THE ONLY PERSON I KNOW WITH A CLEARING BARREL AT MY FRONT DOOR!?!?!?!?

$6 for a 5 gallon bucket, free sand from down the road (hey, Arizona eh?) and 10 minutes to drill drainage holes in the bottom and cut a hole in the lid and rivet in a rubber baffle.
 
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