You will never hear the two sounds a gun shot makes until a high powered bullet or round has been fired at you! The bullet leaves the rifle travelling faster than the speed of sound. You have to have a bullet pass close to you to hear the first sound.
The first sound you hear is the bullet as it passes you and is travelling faster than the speed of sound. It passes you and makes a small sonic boom just like a plane breaking the sound barrier makes a sonic boom that you hear as it passes you but the bullets sonic boom is smaller.
That first sound is a snapping or cracking sound. If you hear it, that means the bullet has already passed you and missed you. It does no good to duck when you hear that crack or snap. The bullet has already passed you. If you don’t hear the bullet, it hit you and if you’re lucky, you’re dead. It’s the shot you don’t hear that kills you.
The second sound you hear from a single bullet fired at you is the loud bang made by the explosion of the gun powder in the bullet cartridge in the gun that accelerates the bullet to greater than the speed of sound coming out of the barrel of the gun. That bang sound of the powder expoding travels at the speed of sound and takes longer to reach you than the bullet itself which is travelling faster than the speed of the powders bang noise.
Think of thunder and lightening. You see the lightning and then a little later you hear the thunder. The further away the lightening occurs the longer the time between the lightening flash that you see first and the sound of thunder that you hear second.
Suiting up for game day on the two way rifle range is the only way to experience the two sounds. You can also let someone shoot at you if they promise to miss and you trust them. ;) The other way to hear it is to raise and lower targets after marking target hits at a long distant rifle range so the shooter can see where their bullet hit.
On some of the videos of the LV shooting you can hear the snap or crack sound passing by the person filming with their cell phone. The snap or crack sound is the bullet. The boom, boom, boom noise is made at the point of origin. ie the gun.
Great post, much more concise than mine. I feel like that guy who gave the three-hour speech at Gettysburg and then got blown away by Lincoln’s 87-word address!! :-))
I’ve worked the pits with people firing M16s. Swear I never heard but one bang.
As for the bullet going past you, how do you explain video sounds? Is it echoes?