the adventures of teapot the cat

Falling Bullets

Posted on December 30th, 2005

Boing Boing addresses why not to shoot a gun into the air for fun. The simple and obvious answer is that a faling bullet will f*** you up worse than a regular gunshot wound. This has a Mythbusters tie-in:

What is your favorite Busted Myth and your favorite Confirmed one? ADAM SAVAGE — I’ve always been partial to the Penny Drop myth, i.e. will a penny dropped from the Empire State Building kill you when it hits the ground? To me, that was one of the most elegant and simple applications of science to a question that we’ve done. Until last week. We just worked on a myth called “bullets fired up” — i.e., will a bullet fired directly vertically kill you when it comes back down. We did tons of research on it, and in the end, added significantly to the body of knowledge that’s out there on the subject. I won’t give away the ending, but we nailed this one.

I wonder when this episode will air - it will be an interesting experiment to pull off since it would be pretty difficult to shoot a bullet in the air and have it fall to a specific location to embed itself in ballistics gel to measure results. I think they will probably drop a bullet at sufficient height in order to acheive terminal velocity. Multiple drops with multiple slugs should take care of random tumbling or lack thereof.

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