Posted on 02/11/2008 6:30:41 AM PST by Vor Lady
All of you FR shootists, I have a question for you: Would it be possible/likely to INTENTIONALLY graze a man's head without killing him, shooting at night in a wind, with no scope using an 1870's rifle? Supposedly the person making this shot was a Civil War trained sharp shooter. The target is moving into the light of a wind blown campfire when he is shot. I say this is hard to believe. Can any of you shooters give me your two cents? Oh, this is fiction for a western someone is writing.
No. In order to do that on purpose, you would need a rifle with the accuracy of a laser. For even the most precise rifle, the chances are 50-50 that you would kill them.
Mathematically it is possible, but probable is another story. Considering you have XX number of sharpshooters in the Civil War (let’s say 10k) each with at least one shot intention of doing what you say. Let’s presume that with the older guns, they will have around a six inch variance in target shot. To graze a man’s head, you would think that the bullet would have to strike with no greater than 1/8th inch offset of the skull (any greater would penetrate).. So, you have 62*8 for your hit variable, so a sharpshooter, all things being equal, would have a 1 in 288 chance of making that shot. You start factoring in wind, light, etc, and you still technically have the possibility- just not the probability as the intention to make this shot would be low.
The person shooting would have WANTED a head shot - and missed by just a wee bit.
The chances of doing this deliberately is pretty much nil, scope or no; I don’t care if the shooter is named Matthew Quigley. It is up there with singing cowboys shooting guns out villain’s hands.
Correction on previous, it should be 6squared * 8, not 62*8.
Who would want to INTENTIONALLY graze. If I am pointing a weapon in someone’s direction I have made my mind up to kill that individual if I have to. You never shoot to wound. You shoot to kill.
there was an episode of Death Valley Days hosted by the Gipper....
....in it a sharp shooter with new rifle ‘wings’ a woman who is running toward alkali spring water in a desert which will kill her if she drinks it....it was supposedly taken from a true story.
Thanks for your helpful replies! I am in a writer’s group where we read our works in progress. A newbie to the group is reading a western she is writing and I thought her whole scene was wonky. I shoot, but am not a trained sharpshooter. She supposedly got her info from an Army woman who is a sniper (I didn’t know the Army had women snipers; I thought sniper is a combat position) who knows all about 1800 era guns.
In her story the campfire is small, there is no moon, the guy is in a box canyon, the bad guys (shooter) are watching from brush at the mouth of the canyon, there is cold wind and the shooter uses this shot (grazing a person’s head) as his prefered method for incapacitating victims,the target is walking from his horse back into the fire light, so he is behind the fire, I think he had his hat down on his head because of the cold wind. She didn’t really say how far away they, the bad guys, are from the target, but they were not shooting from elevation.
As writers of fiction one of the biggest sins one can commit is to ‘take the reader out of the story’ by having them ponder something unbelievable. Her discription of this shooting did just that for me, so I called her on it. I know many Freepers are shooters, so I was hoping to be educated or validated! Thanks one and all!
The odds are so low that if if happened, it wasn’t intentional. Even with a modern rifle and a bench rest at 100 yards, a gust of wind or a minor head move by the target would be fatal.
Odds are against it.
But that's OK: Western films are supposed to be just for grins and outrageous stuff is way cool in that venue
For those of you who are curious, a rifle bullet won't follow the exact aim path. It will be close but if you fire several shots to the same point of aim you will get a different point of impact for each shot -- even if the rifle is held fixed on a mechanical rest
The variations are due to many things; suffice it to say here you are going to see a variation in path
How much? A good .30-06 rifle might fire 5 shots into a 1½ inch circle ( "group" ) at 100 yards. At 200 yards the group will open more than you expect, about 4" instead of 3". And that would be for a good shooting rifle, with carefully loaded ammo.
so can you graze someone as described? It would be a lucky shot; not something you'd do although it could happen
Could it be done? Yes depending on range etc. If I were chosen for that mission I would want to make certain everyone was comfortable with a head splat because the chances are pretty good that would eb the outcome.
It is the target’s movement that would make things complicated, as a person walks they not only move laterally they move vertically and that is where things would get complicated.
Depending on distance, bullet, powder charge etc. the time form firing to impact would make it tough. If you could get the target to stand still for a few seconds it would be a no brainer, again depending on distance.
Now, to make this happen credibly, you have to convince the reader that that period firearm is capable of accuracy to less than one bullet diameter (off by more than that and you do not have a “graze”). This will seem unlikely to a reader familiar with any firearm.
A modern rifle with the oft-touted “One MOA” accuracy has a circle of uncertainty of one inch at 100 yards, so if you have a 30 caliber projectile, that’s a bit over 3 bullet diameters. This means that if you had a shooter so good that she adds no additional error to the One MOA rifle, there is a chance that the bullet would pass more than .3” away from the surface causing a miss, or just graze, or pass perhaps 2 diameters inside the surface, in which case you have a “splat”.
The inherent accuracy required for such a deliberate shot seems unlikely for even a modern weapon. When Annie Oakley shot cigarettes out of her husbands’ mouth, she chose a much shorter range, and more benign conditions. Even then, she only had to get the vertical to be within the dimensions of the cigarette-bullet distances, her windage could vary the length of the cigarette.
It’s not my book, I write espionage thrillers and my people always shoot to kill!
LOL! Darn skippy!
I think you would need the targeted head in clamp too. Imagine how still you would have to be for your head to move at most 1/8 inch while the shooter is lining up the shot and firing.
“I meant to do that! Honest!”
Riiiiiiiiiiight!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.