Public service announcement for New Year's Eve

[buster81]

imported post

superdemon wrote:

buster81 wrote:

All of those that promoting themselves as physics experts should volunteer for a demonstration and catch the falling bullets.

Again, I never said I was a physics expert. I said it was using high school physics.

That certainly does not make me an expert in physics. I'm no more an expert in physics than I am in chemistry, history, English, etc.

I can't help it if you didn't pay attention in high school.

I guess you're volunteering to stand under a falling bullet. Good for you.

 

[Alexcabbie]

imported post

BLANKS!! By golly if you just GOTS to fire in the air, use a revolver and some really loud blanks.

I wouldn't bother mentioning this as it should be common knowleddge, but seeing as to what is being discussed here maybe I better. Blanks are NOT safe to shoot directly at people, they contain a wadding to hold the powder in and make it go bang instead of burning up; and this wadding can kill at short distances. Blanks are not a safe alternative when playing Russian Roulette, (But if you play Russian Roulette maybe I should have just left that out)

However blanks are plan B for those who just cannot resist. Personally I wouldn't pull any Yosenite Sam antics unless it was part of a staged piece of theater where everyone knew what wass taking place, say a parade or a show at a rodeo or something, and even then I would use a specially designed or adapted firearm which would ONLY feed blanks.

The very idea of shooting without a definite intended point of bullet impact makes me absolutely cringe.....

 

[ODA 226]

imported post

Master Doug Huffman wrote:

It's too bad that the ignorant conspirators, suggesting that another be the first to catch a falling bullet, can't be the first to dive the sky.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

I have over 700 jumps. How about you Doug?

 

[45acpForMe]

imported post

ODA 226 wrote:

I have over 700 jumps. How about you Doug?

Just curious ODA, how many sprained ankles, knees etc? I always wanted to freefall but never had the nerve to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. About the time I was getting up the nerve my friend went the week before we were planning to go and broke his leg on the second landing. Another one of my customers jumped a couple times and broke his leg (shattered) and needed 2 years of surgeries and metal pins to recover. So in my mind the civilian rate of injury is every 2nd or 3rd jump you get surgery!!!!

Then again, Doug's obtuse observations make me want to jump out of something every now and then.

 

[Master Doug Huffman]

imported post

ODA 226 wrote:

I have over 700 jumps. How about you Doug?

I stopped counting at 50,000 miles on 'bicycle', preferring a little more exertion. Perhaps the most similar activity was a 1000+ foot free rappel of The Rostrum in Yosemite in about 1968.

 

[Shovelhead]

imported post

1. All guns are always loaded. Even if they are not, treat them as if they are.
2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. (For those who insist that this particular gun is unloaded, see Rule 1.)
3. Keep your finger off the trigger till your sights are on the target. This is the Golden Rule. Its violation is directly responsible for about 60 percent of inadvertent discharges.
4. Identify your target, and what is behind it. Never shoot at anything that you have not positively identified.

Shooting into the air to "celebrate" sounds to me like violations of both rule 2 and 4.



Physicsarenot the issue.

 

[superdemon]

imported post

buster81 wrote:

superdemon wrote:

buster81 wrote:

All of those that promoting themselves as physics experts should volunteer for a demonstration and catch the falling bullets.

Again, I never said I was a physics expert. I said it was using high school physics.

That certainly does not make me an expert in physics. I'm no more an expert in physics than I am in chemistry, history, English, etc.

I can't help it if you didn't pay attention in high school.

I guess you're volunteering to stand under a falling bullet. Good for you.

Yes, absolutely. I will catch a free falling bullet. It's not different than catching a similar sized falling stone.

Some of you people really pray at the altar of hysteria and ignorance.

I would rather think for myself.

 

[buster81]

imported post

superdemon wrote:

buster81 wrote:

superdemon wrote:

buster81 wrote:

All of those that promoting themselves as physics experts should volunteer for a demonstration and catch the falling bullets.

Again, I never said I was a physics expert. I said it was using high school physics.

That certainly does not make me an expert in physics. I'm no more an expert in physics than I am in chemistry, history, English, etc.

I can't help it if you didn't pay attention in high school.

I guess you're volunteering to stand under a falling bullet. Good for you.

Yes, absolutely. I will catch a free falling bullet. It's not different than catching a similar sized falling stone.

Some of you people really pray at the altar of hysteria and ignorance.

I would rather think for myself.

If you have lots offalling stones at terminal velocityin Tennessee on New YearsEve, I'llstay away.

You should talk to this kids mom and explain the laws of high school physics to her.



http://www.cbsatlanta.com/news/22106539/detail.html

4-Year-Old Hit By Bullet At Church Dies

DECATUR, Ga. -- A 4-year-old boy who was struck by a stray bullet while at church died Friday.

The incident happened around midnight Friday during a New Year’s Eve watch service at the Covington Drive Church Of God of Prophecy in Decatur.

It was not immediately clear who fired the shot that came through the roof of the church and struck the child, who was identified as Marquel Peters.

"It's hard. He was my only child. He was only 4. He was a smart little boy, he was so sweet," said his mother, Nathalee Peters.

She said Friday night that she still can’t believe it happened.

“I heard a little sound like a ‘pink.’ I heard him scream a little bit, so I looked around to hand him the game and that's when I saw the blood,” she said. "I tried to pick him up and then, he was losing consciousness and he was just breaking and going down. It was so hard."

DeKalb County police said they thought at first that debris from the roof fell and hit Marquel.

But the medical examiner found the bullet in the boy’s head when he performed the autopsy.

Nathalee Peters wants the person who fired the gun to turn himself in.

"I want to say to the person responsible for this please come forward or whoever out there know something about who did this to my son, please come forward and say something. We need justice," she said.

 

[buster81]

imported post

Mythbusters: Bullets Fired Up

Myth: A bullet fired up can come down and kill you

How high would a bullet fly up?
Adam's idea was to correlate the density of ballistics gel with the density of air (Jamie: "Huh."). Adam figured that if they could see how far a bullet traveled in ballistics gel, they could use the difference in density to calculate the distance it would travel through air. Adam calculated that the ballistics gel is 650x more dense than air, so, according to his theory, if a bullet fired into ballistics gel goes 1ft, it would go 650 ft through air. At least that was the theory: they would have to go to the firing range with some blocks of ballistics gel to see if it would work.

They lined up several blocks of ballistics gel end-on-end at the South San Francisco Police Department firing range (last seen in the Catching a Bullet with Your Teeth myth). They quickly ran into a problem. The 9mm round went through three blocks of ballistics gel for a total distance of about 5ft. The much more powerful .03-06 only went one block in. This wasn't so surprising given the results of the Bulletproof Water myth, though they didn't seem to anticipate the same happening with ballistics gel. The .30-06 rounds travel much faster, so they a greater tendency to break up on impact. Jamie managed to flip a block of ballistics gel with a final shot, finally putting an end to this particular avenue of testing: the ballistics gel was not going to help them figure out how far a bullet would fly up.

Based on the failure of the ballistics gel experiment, they used a computer simulation program to calculate how high the bullets would travel up into the air. The calculations: *.03-6 10,000 ft 58 seconds

9mm 4,000 ft, 37 seconds
Terminal velocity of a falling bullet
Adam built an acrylic wind tunnel (much like the one in the Penny Drop myth). Air was shot up through the bottom and a bullet was dropped into the chamber. The terminal velocity was calculated based on the speed of the air needed to make the bullet stop falling. They figured that the terminal velocity was 100mph (150 ft/s). The wind tunnel also showed that the most stable falling position for the bullets was on their side.

Firing bullets at terminal velocity
The rigged up an air hose to an aluminum pipe to launch the bullets at terminal velocity (150 ft/s). Their first shot put a good dent in the metal door. Their next target would be a pig's head, just as soon as they got the amount of air pressure tuned correctly. A chronograph was used to measure the speed of the bullet and a solenoid valve was attached to the tube to control the air flow.

They fired bullets from the pipe into the pig's head and recorded it all on the high-speed camera. At 166 ft/s, the 9mm bullet bounced right off of the pig's head. The .30-06 bullet did only slightly better, piercing the skin and then bouncing off.

It was looking like this was going to be busted, but, as it turns out, there is an international expert on falling bullets working in nearby Stanford. The expert, Dr. David G Mohler, told them about a case in Menlo Park where a woman sitting in a lawn chair was struck in the leg by a bullet that was fired into the air 1 1/2 miles away during a 4th of July celebration. Mohler recovered the bullet from her leg and the police were able to match the ballistics to a shooter.

Mohler also told them about a case of an elderly man in Alameda who was talking to his wife underneath a plastic corrugated roof in his carport. His eyes rolled up and his wife thought he was having a stroke. When they got to the hospital they found out there was a bullet in his brain and, unfortunately, he died.

"I know for a fact that bullets fired at a distance, returning to Earth, with terminal velocity, have the ability to kill people." - Dr. Mohler

This contradicted their findings so far, so it was back to the drawing board.

Mohave Desert testing
They figured out what was different from their original assumptions: the bullets in Dr. Mohler's cases weren't fired straight up into the air. They were fired at an angle, which meant that they remained spin-stabilized and on a ballistics trajectory.

It was time for them to figure out what would happen with real bullets fired into the air. They went out to the Mohave Desert, where they setup a rig to fire straight up into the air. They planned to fire a bunch of bullets into the air and hopefully find at least one of the bullets where it landed. To maximize their odds, they stationed their crew in bulletproof listening posts.

They first fired bullets straight into the ground as a control:

BB: 3"
9mm: 6"
.30-06: 12"
Jamie fired a clip of 9mm bullets up into the air. 39 seconds later they heard the bullets hit the ground.

Adam: "I'm searching across the desert for a pencil-sized hole"

The first bullet that Adam found went only 2" into the ground and appeared to have hit the ground on it's side. The bullet had traveled 330ft horizontally. Jamie found another bullet hole almost identical to the first.

Jamie then fired the .30-06 rounds. Big problem: after 40 rounds fired into the air, they weren't able to hear any bullets land. The .30-06 rounds travel over twice as high, so they were simply traveling too far for them to find.

Adam brought out plan B: a balloon attached to an instrumented platform that could drop bullets remotely. The platform had a wireless video camera that fed an image of the platform, including the altitude gauge, down to Adam.

The bullets were dropped in a bundle from a height of 400 ft. The .03-06 made a 2" hole. The 9mm made a 2" hole as well, matching up perfectly with the actual 9mm bullet firing.

For the first time ever, they deemed this one busted, plausible, and confirmed. All of their tests, from the pig's head to the 9mm firing to the balloon, showed that a bullet fired perfectly straight up into the air is not lethal. However, it is also very difficult to shoot perfectly straight up into the air and, with the cases cited by Dr. Mohler, they have confirmed that people have died from bullets falling from the sky.

 

[Alexcabbie]

imported post

Hep' me Lawd :banghead:

I am not gonna fire at anything I do not intend to destroy. My name is not Martian Maggot, so I am not gonna try and blow up another planet. So I am not gonna fire a live round into the air.

Oh cripes, now someone is gonna talk about firing to stop an asteroid...:banghead:

 

[superdemon]

imported post

buster81 wrote:

Mythbusters: Bullets Fired Up

Myth: A bullet fired up can come down and kill you

How high would a bullet fly up?
Adam's idea was to correlate the density of ballistics gel with the density of air (Jamie: "Huh."). Adam figured that if they could see how far a bullet traveled in ballistics gel, they could use the difference in density to calculate the distance it would travel through air. Adam calculated that the ballistics gel is 650x more dense than air, so, according to his theory, if a bullet fired into ballistics gel goes 1ft, it would go 650 ft through air. At least that was the theory: they would have to go to the firing range with some blocks of ballistics gel to see if it would work.

They lined up several blocks of ballistics gel end-on-end at the South San Francisco Police Department firing range (last seen in the Catching a Bullet with Your Teeth myth). They quickly ran into a problem. The 9mm round went through three blocks of ballistics gel for a total distance of about 5ft. The much more powerful .03-06 only went one block in. This wasn't so surprising given the results of the Bulletproof Water myth, though they didn't seem to anticipate the same happening with ballistics gel. The .30-06 rounds travel much faster, so they a greater tendency to break up on impact. Jamie managed to flip a block of ballistics gel with a final shot, finally putting an end to this particular avenue of testing: the ballistics gel was not going to help them figure out how far a bullet would fly up.

Based on the failure of the ballistics gel experiment, they used a computer simulation program to calculate how high the bullets would travel up into the air. The calculations: *.03-6 10,000 ft 58 seconds

9mm 4,000 ft, 37 seconds
Terminal velocity of a falling bullet
Adam built an acrylic wind tunnel (much like the one in the Penny Drop myth). Air was shot up through the bottom and a bullet was dropped into the chamber. The terminal velocity was calculated based on the speed of the air needed to make the bullet stop falling. They figured that the terminal velocity was 100mph (150 ft/s). The wind tunnel also showed that the most stable falling position for the bullets was on their side.

Firing bullets at terminal velocity
The rigged up an air hose to an aluminum pipe to launch the bullets at terminal velocity (150 ft/s). Their first shot put a good dent in the metal door. Their next target would be a pig's head, just as soon as they got the amount of air pressure tuned correctly. A chronograph was used to measure the speed of the bullet and a solenoid valve was attached to the tube to control the air flow.

They fired bullets from the pipe into the pig's head and recorded it all on the high-speed camera. At 166 ft/s, the 9mm bullet bounced right off of the pig's head. The .30-06 bullet did only slightly better, piercing the skin and then bouncing off.

It was looking like this was going to be busted, but, as it turns out, there is an international expert on falling bullets working in nearby Stanford. The expert, Dr. David G Mohler, told them about a case in Menlo Park where a woman sitting in a lawn chair was struck in the leg by a bullet that was fired into the air 1 1/2 miles away during a 4th of July celebration. Mohler recovered the bullet from her leg and the police were able to match the ballistics to a shooter.

Mohler also told them about a case of an elderly man in Alameda who was talking to his wife underneath a plastic corrugated roof in his carport. His eyes rolled up and his wife thought he was having a stroke. When they got to the hospital they found out there was a bullet in his brain and, unfortunately, he died.

"I know for a fact that bullets fired at a distance, returning to Earth, with terminal velocity, have the ability to kill people." - Dr. Mohler

This contradicted their findings so far, so it was back to the drawing board.

Mohave Desert testing
They figured out what was different from their original assumptions: the bullets in Dr. Mohler's cases weren't fired straight up into the air. They were fired at an angle, which meant that they remained spin-stabilized and on a ballistics trajectory.

It was time for them to figure out what would happen with real bullets fired into the air. They went out to the Mohave Desert, where they setup a rig to fire straight up into the air. They planned to fire a bunch of bullets into the air and hopefully find at least one of the bullets where it landed. To maximize their odds, they stationed their crew in bulletproof listening posts.

They first fired bullets straight into the ground as a control:

BB: 3"
9mm: 6"
.30-06: 12"
Jamie fired a clip of 9mm bullets up into the air. 39 seconds later they heard the bullets hit the ground.

Adam: "I'm searching across the desert for a pencil-sized hole"

The first bullet that Adam found went only 2" into the ground and appeared to have hit the ground on it's side. The bullet had traveled 330ft horizontally. Jamie found another bullet hole almost identical to the first.

Jamie then fired the .30-06 rounds. Big problem: after 40 rounds fired into the air, they weren't able to hear any bullets land. The .30-06 rounds travel over twice as high, so they were simply traveling too far for them to find.

Adam brought out plan B: a balloon attached to an instrumented platform that could drop bullets remotely. The platform had a wireless video camera that fed an image of the platform, including the altitude gauge, down to Adam.

The bullets were dropped in a bundle from a height of 400 ft. The .03-06 made a 2" hole. The 9mm made a 2" hole as well, matching up perfectly with the actual 9mm bullet firing.

For the first time ever, they deemed this one busted, plausible, and confirmed. All of their tests, from the pig's head to the 9mm firing to the balloon, showed that a bullet fired perfectly straight up into the air is not lethal. However, it is also very difficult to shoot perfectly straight up into the air and, with the cases cited by Dr. Mohler, they have confirmed that people have died from bullets falling from the sky.

So we are taking third party, anecdotal, unreviewed statement, and saying it proves one point, when in fact, the experiment that they conducted proved just the opposite?

Again, my statements and assertations are about handgun rounds fired straight into the sky.

 

[buster81]

imported post

superdemon wrote:

hopnpop wrote:

If you're like me and like to empty a magazine or two at midnight on New Year's Eve, just remember that what goes up must come down.This is a reminder that you areultimately responsible for your bullet(s), wherever they may fall. So if you fire into the sky, might I recommend using a shotgun and some type of shot load. Little pellets of shot are much safer when returning to earth and they also don't have the range that single bullets do. Just a note.

You know this whole thing is kind of an urban myth, right?

I mean, the whole being killed by a bullet shot into the air?

Right?

QFT.

 

[buster81]

imported post

If shooting someone else isn't motivation NOT to shoot in the air, maybe getting arrested is?



http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/article/20100102/NEWS01/100102008/Man+arrested+after+shooting+gun+in+air

Man arrested after shooting gun in air

A dispute over fireworks led to the arrest of a Moss Point man after a bullet from a gun he fired into the air landed in his neighbor’s house.

The man was arrested for shooting into an occupied dwelling after an altercation with neighbors in Hattiesburg.

Hattiesburg Police spokesman Synarus Green said police arrested Kevin Hinton, 27, of Moss Point, after responding a call to the 100 block of East Eighth Street around 10 p.m. Friday.

Green said officers on the scene reported the altercation was because someone wouldn’t stop shooting fireworks.

Police say Hinton went into the house, came outside with a handgun and fired several rounds in the air.

One round went into the residence of the people he had a dispute with.

 

[Alexcabbie]

imported post

Okay, folks. If you agree with the following statement please post a "+1":

IT IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA TO FIRE LIVE ROUNDS WHEN YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHERE THEY ARE GOING TO HIT, NO MATTER WHAT SPEED THEY ARE TRAVELLING WHEN THEY DO HIT.

Jeeeeeezzzzzzzzzzzzzzuuuuuzzzz.

 

[buster81]

imported post

+2

 

[simmonsjoe]

imported post

superdemon wrote:

I don't need any citation for it, all I need is high school physics.

Ok, the acceleration due to gravity near the surface of the Earth is 9.8m/s squared.

That's about 32 ft/s squared.

If I stand next to you, and drop a bullet at the exact same time that you fire one out of a gun, into say an infinite open field, parallel to the gound,both bullets would hit the ground at the same time.

Why?

Gravity will pull on both rounds at exactly the same rate. The round in free fall will be falling at the exact same rate as the round fired by the gun. Horizontal speed has no effect, and cannot counteract the acceleration due to gravity. When the round that I dopped hits the ground, the round fired from the weapon will hit the ground at the same time. When mine hits the ground, yours has too.

Even if we started 5 meters off the ground, which is almost 16.5 feet off the ground, both rounds would hit the ground in one second. (That is half of the 9.8 m/s squared, since both object started at rest)

Also, a round fired either paralell to the ground, or at an upwards angle, will immediately start to lose speed due to air resistance, and this loss of speed will exponential as it travels and loses inertia.

I will simplify for you:

A 9mm round traveling at 300m/s (984 f/s) will only fly 165 meters (541 feet)before it hits the ground, if fired parallel to the ground. You could safely stand 600 feetdirectly in front of someonefiring the round, and it would not even reach you.

Now, increasing the fired angle will cause the projectile to go further, but it will be moving slower when it gets to it's target, due to deceleration from air resistance. The longer the round stays in the air, the longer it is in contact with the air causing the resistance, thus the slower it will be traveling when it arrives at it's final destination.

Now back to the whole firing into the air thing...

If you fire directly and straight into the air, the bullet will rise, stall, and then start to freefall. It cannot fall faster than it's terminal velocity, which is equivialant to the amount of air needed to stop it's acceleration, becuause it is not being propelled or acted upon by the explosive force of the gases that forced it down the barrel.This is also the amount of air it takes to START the object moving. Take a 9mm round, and place it on a table, and I bet you could blow hard enough to get it moving. That's with the added friction of the table it is sitting on, so imagine how little air it would take to cause that round to stop accelerating as it falls. Notice we are sayng make it stop accelerating, not make it stop it's motion altogether...



It's very similar to the old "Toss a penny off the Empire State Building" urban myth. While it may not be comfortable, and it may even hurt, the round cannon travel fast enough to seriously injure you coming straight back down on you.

Cite Please!! MWahhaha!
Everything above is correct. However, the terminal velocity of a bullet is much faster than that of a penny, if for no other reason than a non-spinning disk has a huge drag coefficient. That is neglecting the heavier mass. Still, a 9mm bullet has a terminal velocity of ... wait for it... 150fps

The problem is, if a bullet is even slightly off the course of straight up, it will retain a BALLISTICS TRAJECTORY, be spin stabilized, and a whole new set of equations apply. In short it can kill you even if the bullet was fired only slightly off vertical.

Conclusion?? Only ASS-HATS shoot guns in the air. If it is that important to you, SHOOT INTO SOMETHING THAT WONT CAUSE RICOCHETS.

 

[simmonsjoe]

imported post

Isn't this all a violation of one of the 4 rules of gun safety? Identify your target, and what is behind it.

Jeff Cooper would smack you all silly.

 

[ODA 226]

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simmonsjoe wrote:

Only ASS-HATS shoot guns in the air.

HEHEHE! You said ASS-HAT! :what::lol:

 

[ODA 226]

imported post

45acpForMe wrote:

ODA 226 wrote:

I have over 700 jumps. How about you Doug?

Just curious ODA, how many sprained ankles, knees etc? I always wanted to freefall but never had the nerve to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. About the time I was getting up the nerve my friend went the week before we were planning to go and broke his leg on the second landing. Another one of my customers jumped a couple times and broke his leg (shattered) and needed 2 years of surgeries and metal pins to recover. So in my mind the civilian rate of injury is every 2nd or 3rd jump you get surgery!!!!

Then again, Doug's obtuse observations make me want to jump out of something every now and then.

Fractured left ankle once, one tib/fib fracture left leg, both knees injured right knee requiring surgery, right shoulder damaged requiring surgery, multiple sprains, one spinal compression and one concussion.

Most of these injuries were beyond my control, like getting a JMPI stating you'll be dropped at 1000' AGL with zero illum with full equipment and then we got dropped at 500' AGL.....no fun!

There's been other times the wind at ground level was 3-5 knots and the winds at altitude were 30-gusting to 40 knots....hit the trees....no fun!

I think the worst one was jumping into Germany in the middle of a cloud burst at night with zero illum and landing in the middle of a field that had just been covered with the most WONDERFUL smelling cow-poo-poo....no fun at all!

 

[hopnpop]

imported post

ODA 226 wrote:

Fractured left ankle once, one tib/fib fracture left leg, both knees injured right knee requiring surgery, right shoulder damaged requiring surgery, multiple sprains, one spinal compression and one concussion.

Most of these injuries were beyond my control, like getting a JMPI stating you'll be dropped at 1000' AGL with zero illum with full equipment and then we got dropped at 500' AGL.....no fun!

There's been other times the wind at ground level was 3-5 knots and the winds at altitude were 30-gusting to 40 knots....hit the trees....no fun!

I think the worst one was jumping into Germany in the middle of a cloud burst at night with zero illum and landing in the middle of a field that had just been covered with the most WONDERFUL smelling cow-poo-poo....no fun at all!

Only 56 jumps logged herebut none military - all recreational. Recreational meaning I jumped only in conditions I wanted to jump in. No injuries, even minor. Not even a twisted ankle. I landed on my ass a few times but well over 90% of my jumps have resulted in beautiful landings. I'm also under a nice, slow, Manta ram-air canopy; nothing high performance that would bring me in at 30mph.

For recreation jumping, I think, with a good instructor and good equipment, skydiving is pretty darn safe for an adventure sport. Safer than bunjee jumping anyday.


Oh, and I owe Alexcabbiea

"+1" for above