Posted on 07/04/2017 5:09:29 PM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
Hammond, ID (WGN) -- A 13-year-old boy from Hammond, Indiana was hit in the head by a bullet that fell after someone fired a gun During a 4th of July celebration.
The teen was flown to a hospital in Chicago in critical condition. His grandmother tells WGN the boy is not doing well.
The teen was playing basketball on Saturday around 9:30 p.m. in the backyard of a home in the 7300 block of Harrison Ave when he fell to the ground.
His friends thought he was having a seizure, but when he got to the hospital, they found he had been shot in the head.
(Excerpt) Read more at azfamily.com ...
Prayers for the kid. Nothing like a little physics on the 4th!
>>Prayers for the kid.<<
Good point — of course prayers up.
Falling-bullet injuries
Bullets fired into the air usually fall back with terminal velocities much lower than their muzzle velocity when they leave the barrel of a firearm. Nevertheless, people can be injured, sometimes fatally, when bullets discharged into the air fall back down to the ground. Bullets fired at angles less than vertical are more dangerous, as the bullet maintains its angular ballistic trajectory, is far less likely to engage in tumbling motion, and so travels at speeds much higher than a bullet in free fall.A study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 80% of celebratory gunfire-related injuries are to the head, feet, and shoulders. In Puerto Rico, about two people die and about 25 more are injured each year from celebratory gunfire on New Year's Eve, the CDC says. Between the years 1985 and 1992, doctors at the King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, treated some 118 people for random falling-bullet injuries. Thirty-eight of them died.
Firearms expert Julian Hatcher studied falling bullets in the 1920s and calculated that .30 caliber rounds reach terminal velocities of 90 m/s (300 feet per second or 204 miles per hour). A bullet traveling at only 61 m/s (200 feet per second) to 100 m/s (330 feet per second) can penetrate human skin.
In 2005, the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) ran education campaigns on the dangers of celebratory gunfire in Serbia and Montenegro. In Serbia, the campaign slogan was "every bullet that is fired up, must come down."
That is simply not true, unless you are shooting the bullet horizontally or toward the ground.
A bullet is slowing the instant it leaves the muzzle of my rifle when I shoot it straight up overhead. But that bullet is climbing until it isn't.
The bullet is certainly earthbound the instant it leaves my rifle...but it takes a while to begin to fall.
Think of it as a vector with two components, vertical and horizontal. The vertical component by itself, that of a spent bullet falling at terminal velocity (which would not be the same as for a penny, since a bullet is not a penny), is not enough to do serious damage in most cases. If you add a horizontal component, though, the resultant is more than the vertical component alone.
If nothing is still driving the bullet, it’s falling. Its upward momentum may cause it to get farther from the earth temporarily, but it is falling the whole time.
A mortar round is packed with explosive.
the bullet will not be coming down faster than terminal velocity in any situation.
Believe what you want. I've read the story of a doctor working on a little girl who had a bullet enter the top of her skull, take out her eye and lodge in her cheekbone. No, she wasn't sleeping in her bed when she was shot. Terminal velocity did not do that damage.
>>Think of it as a vector with two components, vertical and horizontal. The vertical component by itself, that of a spent bullet falling at terminal velocity (which would not be the same as for a penny, since a bullet is not a penny), is not enough to do serious damage in most cases. If you add a horizontal component, though, the resultant is more than the vertical component alone.<<
Yes, I assumed up in a steep angle, nearing 90 degrees — probably good for 70 - 90 degrees due to the height if fired primarily “up.”
As I posted upthread you would need a modeler to calculate the force and I don’t have enough physics offhand to do that (although I could do the programming).
A bullet is not a penny and we need to redo the calculation. I found a terminal velocity calculator and I should have used 30 m/s as terminal velocity. The mass is correct for a bullet (average .38).
“A bullet is falling from the instant it leaves the muzzle.”
Physic 101, well maybe 102. It all depends on velocity when it hits you.
My dad grew up a few blocks away from there.
Entertainment back then when I was a kid wasn’t dodging bullets, it was spying on the widow Ferney next door entertaining men and after the mosquito insecticide truck came down the street and playing W.W.II G.I.s in the fog they left behind! And the ice cream truck in the evenings.
Born in Gary, same hospital as Michael Jackson. Wouldn’t set foot in that area now.
I don’t blame the now out of control community but the Rats that dangled the glittery carrot of dependency for votes. (Starting with LBJ or maybe Wilson or Roosevelt) They have always been using blacks since we started. Now they are branching out. They will suck the life force out anyone vulnerable.
Mythbusters did cover this. Here's a brief summary: link
Bullets fired into the air maintain their lethal capability when they eventually fall back down.
BUSTED / PLAUSIBLE / CONFIRMED <-- yes all 3!!
In the case of a bullet fired at a precisely vertical angle (something extremely difficult for a human being to duplicate), the bullet would tumble, lose its spin, and fall at a much slower speed due to terminal velocity and is therefore rendered less than lethal on impact. However, if a bullet is fired upward at a non-vertical angle (a far more probable possibility), it will maintain its spin and will reach a high enough speed to be lethal on impact. Because of this potentiality, firing a gun into the air is illegal in most states, and even in the states that it is legal, it is not recommended by the police. Also the MythBusters were able to identify two people who had been injured by falling bullets, one of them fatally injured.
(This is the only myth to receive all three ratings at the same time.)
Interestingly, no politics in this thread!!
Well, so far. lol
We developed a sudden water stain in the ceiling a number of years ago. It turned out to stem from a leak in the roof. We live in a 1917 rowhouse in DC. We had replaced the old tin roof 15 or so years earlier and the new tin roof, which should outlive us, was in fine condition. But there was a bullet hole in it. (We found the bullet.) Just some baseline Democrat voters out doing their thing. If a spent bullet can penetrate a roof, it could do real damage to someone's head.
When the bullet shot straight up reaches its peak, its velocity is zero and deducting frictional losses that heat the atmosphere, all its kinetic energy, mass times velocity squared when the gun was fired, has been converted to potential energy, mass times acceleration of gravity times the maximum height. As the bullet falls and speeds up, the potential energy is converted back into kinetic energy. While frictional losses insure the bullet won’t reach the ground with same velocity it left the ground, it will still hit with enough kinetic energy to do damage.
Yeah, with the right horizontal angle definitely.
Correction: kinetic energy = 1/2(mass)(velocity squared)
Your math is good, just account for wind resistance. I think a good test would be to see at what angle below 90 degrees it becomes fatal.
A youth in the Dallas area was killed by confirmed celebratory gunfire just a few years ago.
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