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Teen playing basketball injured from falling bullet
AZFAMILY.COM ^ | 04 JULY 2017 | WGN.COM

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 ...


TOPICS: Health/Medicine
KEYWORDS: idaho; newtons2ndlaw
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To: PapaBear3625

More here, also a fun site.

http://www.frfrogspad.com/miscella.htm#straight

Hatcher’s tests indicated that on the average, vertically fired rifle bullets reach about 9000 feet in altitude (slowed from their muzzle velocity by air drag and gravity to zero velocity), taking about 20 seconds to reach maximum height. Then, pulled by gravity, and slowed by air drag they take about 40 or so seconds to return. Bullets fired vertically come back base first. Why? Read on!...

The Haag article used a ballistics computation program to calculate vertically fired bullet performance and came up with results comparable with Hatcher’s work. Using bullets ranging from the .22 rim fire to the 180gr .30 caliber spitzer in the .30-06 the time of flight (up & back) ranged from a low of 25 seconds for the .25ACP to a long of 77 seconds for the M193 ball. Maximum altitudes ranged from a low of 2288 feet for the .25ACP to a high of 10,103 feet for the 180gr .30-06. Terminal velocities ranged from 134 f/s for a tumbling .22 Short to a high of 323 f/s for the 180gr .30-06...

As a point of interest, a velocity of about between 180 and 360 f/s (±) is needed to penetrate skin. The wide range comes from the non-uniform strength of normal skin tissue. Projectile shape has no statistically significant effect on the penetration. However, one could still be seriously injured if struck by a falling bullet even if it doesn’t break the skin.


41 posted on 07/04/2017 7:49:03 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT (GO TRUMP!)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I caught that, too.


42 posted on 07/04/2017 7:56:03 PM PDT by logi_cal869 (-cynicus-)
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To: freedumb2003

Basketball is dangerous. We need to ban basketball.

There. Happy?

Gotta love the armchair ballistics/forensics with nary a single piece of evidence. Gawd these guys are good. /s


43 posted on 07/04/2017 8:03:40 PM PDT by logi_cal869 (-cynicus-)
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To: DUMBGRUNT
...Bullets fired vertically come back base first. Why? Read on!..

I actually own a copy of Hatcher's Notebook and have read the original experiments.

Some bullets fired vertically come down base first, some turn over and come down point first.

He did the experiment with a machine gun on a boat in a small lake. Fire a short burst straight up and time how long until the bullets splash down. They come down in two distinct groups.

44 posted on 07/04/2017 9:42:23 PM PDT by CurlyDave
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To: freedumb2003
about 14 KG of force or about 6.5 pounds



You got it backwards... 14 Kg = 30.8647 lbs That is much MORE ouch..
45 posted on 07/04/2017 10:06:06 PM PDT by Bikkuri
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To: freedumb2003
Just what is the terminal velocity of a fusiform boat tailed bullet?

Also, if the bullet has more mass, heavier, it would not go any faster coming down, but would impart greater energy to the object it strikes. Think brick and penny, both at terminal velocity, which is a function of the air resistance causing the falling object to "float" as the air resistance equals the gravitational acceleration.

Indeed, some projectiles will penetrate that skull with sufficient force to scramble the soft tissue inside.

46 posted on 07/04/2017 10:14:01 PM PDT by going hot (Happiness is a Momma Deuce)
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To: freedumb2003

“Too bad Mythbusters closed shop — it would be a great one to test at different angles”

They did that one. They were on a dry lake bed where they could find the fallen bullets. IIRC the ones found weren’t even deformed from impact. Don’t recall them doing different angles though, that would make bullets nearly impossible to recover


47 posted on 07/04/2017 10:34:52 PM PDT by Figment
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To: Bikkuri

Yikes!

Ouch indeed!


48 posted on 07/05/2017 7:33:38 AM PDT by freedumb2003 (The Civil Rights movement compared content of their character to skin color and chose the latter)
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To: CurlyDave

I had wondered about the methodology, thanks.

He did the experiment with a machine gun on a boat in a small lake. Fire a short burst straight up and time how long until the bullets splash down. They come down in two distinct groups.


49 posted on 07/05/2017 9:02:45 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT (GO TRUMP!)
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To: DUMBGRUNT

“...Not if it’s truly a falling bullet and lost its inertia. At a bullets terminal velocity from falling it doesn’t have the energy. ...” [miliantnutcase, Post 13]

“...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)....” [freedumb2003, Post 29]

“...Bullets fired vertically come back base first. ... The Haag article used a ballistics computation program to calculate vertically fired bullet performance and came up with results comparable with Hatcher’s work. ...” [DUMBGRUNT, Post 41]

Great thanks to DUMBGRUNT for referencing the max-altitude tests undertaken by US Army Ordnance as written about by BGen Julian Hatcher.

Can’t locate my copy of Hatcher’s Notebook just now to recheck details, but memory indicates the experimenters did not use a boat, they used a long wooden pier extending out into the Atlantic Ocean, on the coast of Florida near Daytona Beach (those were the days long before Florida emerged as a vacation destination, before hi-rise hotels were built on every linear inch of coastline).

A shed with open walls and a metal roof was built on the tip of the pier, and a M1917 (water cooled) 30 cal machine gun was placed in a special mount just a slight distance out past the edge of the roof, trainable to point vertically.

(These details were summarized in an article in American Rifleman, Machine Gun News (before it became Small Arms Review), or one of the more technically oriented gun periodicals like Rifle or Handloader).

The M1917 was adjusted to fire single shots, not burst fire. Experimenters recovered only two bullets - one landed in a bucket of water near the metal roof, and I forget the impact position of the other. Other bullets were heard to hit the seawater around the end of the pier but were not recovered.

The lack of success in bullet recovery was a mystery at the time but was later accounted for by the discovery of a large number of layers in the atmosphere, which are discontinuous and often move at surprisingly high speeds, in directions very different form each other, and from winds at the surface. Their thickness varies too ... all parameters can change from moment to moment.

(Unfortunately, when the Mythbusters performed their tests, they apparently knew nothing about the wind velocity/direction variations nor atmospheric layering, and remained unable to explain their own lack of success in recovering 30-06 bullets, when they tested their M1 Garand in a dry lake bed)

Rifle bullets like that for the 30-06 (and, apparently, 7.62x39) can indeed pick up sufficient velocity while falling back to earth, to do serious injury - despite what miliantnutcase posted in Post 13. In another Rifleman article, dating to the 1990s if memory serves, it was stated that US Army Ordnance used a figure of 61 foot-pounds as the threshold for “serious” injury (what reference they used, I no longer recall): not terribly large, noting that advertised energy for original 25 ACP loadings was 73 foot-pounds, and 32 S&W was 85 foot-pounds.

There are no purely mathematical prediction models that would allow freedumb2003 to calculate the trajectory of a small arms bullet nor an artillery projectile all the way from muzzle departure to target. Trajectories have to be piecewise-integrated over the full path, due to the unpredictable nature of air drag, surface imperfections of the projectile, and still other weather conditions (ambient temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, etc). These constraints were discovered by Britain’s Royal Navy or US Coast Artillery (I forget which at the moment) when control of long-range gunfire was being worked out - before WWII, or earlier still. Firing tests had to be conducted on the range, and trajectory values had to be experimentally determined, then compiled in firing tables (or later, into analog computing devices). One method was named Runge-Kutta. I’ve no idea if it’s still in use.

I never learned how much rotational velocity was lost to air resistance, but the rotational direction in relation to relative wind when 50 cal machine guns were fired from the B-29 bomber was found to have a serious effect on trajectory, depending on whether the machine gun was fired to the left or the right, compared to the aircraft’s direction of flight. The B-29 was the first US warplane to be equipped with a computerized central fire control system, and these elements had to be incorporated into the (analog) programming.

If other forum members wonder where I could have picked up these details, I confess that while on active duty I was a B-52 aircrew member, and later was responsible for operational testing of the Defensive Fire Control Systems on B-52s - ASG-15 and ASG-21. Plus a number of other defense systems on several airframes.


50 posted on 07/05/2017 10:52:23 AM PDT by schurmann
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To: going hot

“Just what is the terminal velocity of a fusiform boat tailed bullet?...” [going hot, Post 46]

Thanks to going hot for jogging my memory about major factors I left out of my summary in Post 50: air density and speed of sound. They are closely related.

There is no single value of terminal velocity for a projectile falling to earth through the air: many characteristics - of the projectile, and of the air it is falling through - cause effects that vary, sometimes abruptly.

Air density is one of the most important characteristics affecting friction from he air, and thus terminal velocity. Atmospheric density varies, decreasing with altitude - and also with weather conditions such as temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, etc. The denser the air, the more friction will slow whatever is going through the air (the aeronautic term for air friction is drag).

Changes in drag due to air density is why Joe Kittinger (now Col, USAF (ret)) reached a maximum speed of 614 mph (about Mach 0.9 at his altitude) when he leapt from a balloon gondola in August 1960, free-falling from over 102,000 ft. Civilian parachustists free-fall from much lower altitudes and in the denser air don’t exceed 120 mph too often.

The speed of sound in air is not a constant but varies according to several factors, the foremost of which is temperature.

This fact affects the trajectory of any bullet that leaves the muzzle above Mach 1.0; above the “sound barrier” any solid object trails a shock wave. When it slows below the speed of sound, the shock wave dissipates. The intensity and angle of incidence of the shock wave vary greatly, depending on the parameters of the atmosphere at that exact location, at that moment - and the velocity of the projectiles. And the position of the waves coming off the projectile can vary so quickly human perception cannot follow them.

Aerodynamic scientists took many years to figure all this out, leading some researchers to predict that human flight above Mach 1.0 would never be possible. They were wrong, but lives were lost during the effort, while difficult research went forward, and imaginative designs were devised to work out the science and produce systems capable of doing the job.

For our purposes, this means that a bullet transitioning from supersonic to subsonic velocity can change direction radically and unpredictably.

All of which means that no one can predict where happy fire might return to earth - not with any certainty.


51 posted on 07/07/2017 1:35:56 PM PDT by schurmann
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To: schurmann
I certainly would not want to stand under point of impact and get hit on the topside of my head (haid?) by a chunk of lead, copper jacketed or naked, that has had a mile or so to get up to speed first.

That would be akin to holding up that book and have the g friend or wife touch off a round!

52 posted on 07/07/2017 7:46:05 PM PDT by going hot (Happiness is a Momma Deuce)
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To: going hot

The top speed it would reach would be 120mph or so. The bullet from the weapon you reference would be travelling at around 1000mph. Big difference.


53 posted on 07/07/2017 7:58:52 PM PDT by 11Bush
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To: 11Bush
Still not doing either. Chunk of lead at 120 +/-, depending on the above well written commentary connecting with my cranium might not blow it off, but will likely put a good dent in it.

Kinda like those captive bolts used to drop steers.

Now, birdshot, well, ok, I would stand under an umbrella, lol.

When much younger, I developed an intense respect of lead flying toward me, at any speed.

54 posted on 07/07/2017 8:06:59 PM PDT by going hot (Happiness is a Momma Deuce)
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To: going hot

Yeah, I hear you. Looks like we went to the same school, just different departments.


55 posted on 07/07/2017 8:18:57 PM PDT by 11Bush
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To: freedumb2003

In other news.

If you drop a cat from a balcony at about 10-12 stories it will survive.

From about 12 stories up to around 50-60 stories it will die.

Above that, the cat will reach terminal velocity and has the ability to anticipate the impact and can survive.

I may be totally off with this, but I read it on “Al Gore’s Amazing Internet” PBOH, and therefore believe it to be true.

I think.


56 posted on 07/07/2017 8:23:36 PM PDT by Zeneta
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