.............................................
Firing Bullets
Fire
a Bullet Straight Up: How High Does It Go?
BY PATRICK J. KIGER
On
New Year's Eve 2017, Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives
Armando Martinez, stepped outside a home and suddenly felt as if he'd been
struck with a sledgehammer.
After
he was rushed to the hospital, it turned out that he'd been struck on the top
of the head by a falling .223-caliber bullet.
A
fragment of the round penetrated the top of his skull and lodged itself in the
top layer of his brain, requiring surgery to remove it, according to CNN.
Martinez,
who recovered from his injury, became another victim of the strange custom of
celebratory gunfire, in which revelers fire bullets into the air that
eventually fall back to Earth — and occasionally hit other people.
There
aren't good statistics on how often this happens across the U.S., but news
reports describe numerous fatalities over the years.
This
2015 article from The Trace, for example, describes two cases of children
killed by falling bullets apparently fired during Fourth of July celebrations
in 2011 and 2012.
A
2004 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that on
New Year's Eve and New Year's Day of that year, bullets from celebratory
gunfire caused 19 injuries and one death.
Thirty-six
percent of the victims were struck on the top of the head, with feet (26
percent) and shoulders (16 percent) the next most common injury sites.
This
2017 Miami Herald article cites numerous instances over the years, ranging
from at least 20 people killed in Iraq in 2003 by celebratory gunfire after the
death of Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay.
So How High Will a Bullet Go?
Aside from the perplexing question of why such a
reckless, potentially lethal practice remains so popular, you may also be wondering,
what actually happens to a bullet that's fired straight up into the sky?
How
high does it go? What stops it and sends it falling back to Earth? And when it
descends, when and where does it land?
Those
aren't necessarily simple questions to answer.
Ballistics
researchers have spent a lot of time studying the performance of bullets fired
horizontally, because that's useful information for improving the accuracy and
range of shooters.
But
when it comes to firing straight up in the air, which isn't something that
soldiers, police officers, hunters or target shooters normally would do,
there's not nearly as much data.
U.S.
Army Maj. Gen. Julian Hatcher, who apparently was curious and had some time on
his hands, did experiments in Florida in which he fired various weapons —
ranging from rifles to machine guns — up into the air, and tried to measure how
long it took for the bullets to come down, as well as where they landed.
As
he noted in his 1947 volume “Hatcher’s Notebook,” he calculated that a
standard .30 caliber bullet fired from a rifle pointed straight up would rise
to an altitude of 9,000 feet (2,743.2 meters) in 18 seconds, and then would
return to Earth in another 31 seconds, and during the last few thousand feet
would attain a "nearly constant" speed of 300 feet (91.4 meters) per
second.
But
ballistics researcher James Walker, who holds a doctorate in mathematics
and is department director of engineering dynamics at the Southwest Research Institute in
San Antonio, says that the altitude attained by a bullet fired straight up
would depend upon the type of weapon and projectile, just as it does when fired
horizontally.
A
handgun, which has a shorter barrel than a rifle and fires ammunition with a
smaller cartridge that doesn't contain as much powder, isn't going to send a
bullet soaring as high as a rifle will.
Different
types of rifles and ammunition vary as well.
"With
a .22, which isn't a big-game rifle, the cartridge is the same diameter as the
bullet," Walker explains. "It doesn't have that much powder, and
that bullet doesn't go fast. Rifles like the .30-06 have a much larger
cartridge, which will go faster because there is more powder to burn."
When
fired horizontally, bullets tend to slow down rapidly due to air drag, so that
a rifle bullet may be down to half of its initial speed by the time it gets to
500 meters (1,640.42 feet), Walker says.
When
a gun is fired when pointed up, gravity will slow the bullet down even faster.
For
altitude estimates, Walker pointed to this chart on the website of Close
Focus Research, a ballistics testing company, which shows that a .25 caliber
ACP handgun bullet might reach a maximum height of 2,287 feet (697 meters),
while a .30-06 rifle bullet would rise to 10,105 feet (3,080 meters).
What Goes Up...
But no matter how high a bullet goes in the air,
however, eventually it will decelerate until its velocity reaches zero, at which
point it will begin to fall back to Earth, as detailed in this 2018 article on
falling bullet injuries in the Journal of Neuroscience Rural Practice.
"Again,
the height up is a non-issue as to the speed down, as the bullet (if no longer
spin stabilized) will hit a terminal velocity based on its shape, orientation,
and whether or not it is tumbling,"
Walker explains in a follow-up email.
And
most importantly, a bullet is unlikely to fall straight down, as wind can alter
its path, Walker says. That makes it difficult to predict where a bullet will
land.
Back
in Texas, Representative Martinez sought to keep others from being hit by
falling bullets, by introducing legislation raising the penalties for
discharging a firearm without an intended target, according to The Monitor.
So
far, he hasn't been successful, but he reportedly plans to try again in 2019.
NOW THAT'S DISTURBING
This
2007 article in Annals of Thoracic Surgery describes the unusual case of a
47-year-old man who was struck in the chest by a bullet that fell from the sky,
and suffered cardiac and abdominal injuries as a result.
Doctors eventually found a
.45 caliber bullet inside his stomach. Though the damage required nine hours of
surgery to fix, the patient eventually recovered.
Patrick Kiger
Patrick J. Kiger has written for HowStuffWorks since 2008 covering a
wide array of topics, from history and politics to pop culture and technology.
He worked as a newspaper reporter for the Pittsburgh Press, and the Orange
County Register in California, where he covered one of the biggest serial
murder cases in U.S. history, and also as a staff writer at Baltimore Magazine.
As a freelancer, Patrick has written for print publications such as GQ, Mother
Jones and the Los Angeles Times, and on the web for National Geographic
Channel, Discovery News, Science Channel and Fast Company, among others. In
recent years, he's become increasingly interested in how technological advances
are altering urban life and the design of cities, and has written extensively
on that subject for Urban Land magazine. In his spare time, Patrick is a
longtime martial arts student and a fan of crime fiction, punk rock and classic
Hollywood films.
No comments:
Post a Comment