True Stories #424 - What Goes Up Must Come Down

What happens when someone fires a gun into the sky? (Hint: It's not good.)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. What goes up must come down. That
is the rule. And for the pedantic, we know there
are exceptions to that rule, but it is certainly true

(00:23):
for one specific type of object, an object launched from
the ground way up into the sky. Bullets. Now, today's
true story is not about surprises. It's about physics and
an answer to the question that many of us have
wondered about. If you fire a gun into the air,

(00:44):
will that projectile simply drop harmlessly to the earth a
few dozen yards or maybe a few thousand feet away. Well,
this is an informed and educated audience, so you probably
already know that bullets can kill, even when their journey
starts at the twelve o'clock barrel position pointed straight up

(01:05):
into the air. Why do people do this, Well, it
is almost always not because they are in a fit
of murderous rage. Their motivation is celebration. Maybe they're ringing
in the new year at a wedding party, a patriotic festival,
their sports team just won a key match. Whatever. And

(01:26):
despite our obsession with firearms in the US, this is
not a uniquely American phenomenon. Just a few examples of
festivity firings from the past. Several years back, in twenty sixteen,
the Philippines saw a barrage of fireworks and weapons firing
into the sky on New Year's Eve across the country.

(01:48):
On that day, more than six hundred people were injured
and a child was killed. Two had died the year before,
Three perished in twenty eleven and from falling bullets. When
the Iraqi football team defeated Vietnam in two thousand and
seven's Asia Cup, fans grabbed weapons and blasted bullets into

(02:11):
the air, those bullets falling down and ending the lives
of three. After the First Gulf War ended in nineteen
ninety one, celebratory gunfire was blamed for twenty deaths. The
problem was so bad in the former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia that the government ran an ad campaign with the

(02:33):
slogan bullets are not greeting cards, celebrate without weapons. And
of course, here in the United States of the Second Amendments,
a nation with more guns than people, we have seen
more than our share of lethal projectiles dropping on unsuspecting citizens.
One study reported statistics from a single Los Angeles Hospital,

(02:57):
which reported that thirty eight people had died from falling
bullet injuries between the years of nineteen eighty five and
nineteen ninety two. That is one hospital in one city.
And then, of course there's the occasional overhead aircraft that
gets nicked by a celebratory round. Now I mentioned the physics,

(03:20):
and I'm going to have to simplify things here, but
in a nutshell, there is muzzle velocity that's the speed
of a bullet fired right out of the gun, and
terminal velocity that's the maximum speed an object can reach
if it falls via gravity through wind resistance. Think about
a skydiver jumping out of the plane, reaching a maximum

(03:44):
speed before that levels off. Bullets fired directly vertically will
lose the most speed on descent, still potentially lethal, but
less so than bullets fired at an angular trajectory. Vertical
bullets are more likely to start tumbling as they fall
straight down. That further reduces the speed. But if you

(04:05):
shoot a bullet at an angle, that round will maintain
its ballistic trajectory, moving faster because the bullets is not tumbling,
not agitating through the air, and moving much more smoothly
and quickly toward a destination somewhere. Over one hundred years ago,
the Army studied this. They looked at the speed of

(04:28):
vertically fired bullets and came up with some statistics. Thirty
caliber rounds can hit the altitude of nine thousand feet
or higher and reach a falling terminal velocity of up
to one hundred eighty six miles an hour. Nine millimeters
rounds reached terminal velocities of up to one hundred seventy

(04:48):
miles an hour. And remember that a bullet traveling at
one hundred thirty miles an hour forty miles an hour
slower can still pierce human skin. And that is a
fe refall terminal velocity, not the muzzle velocity propelled by gunpowder.
Those more aerodynamically stable angled shots can land miles away,

(05:13):
so far that a potential victim would not even hear
the gun go off. And of course we have to
see the reality that almost no gun is fired at
a perfectly vertical angle. There's going to be some variation.
Those bullets are not going too slow to terminal velocity.
They're going to still be supercharged missiles heading out to

(05:35):
who knows where, and potentially harming who knows who. So
if you ever see somebody who is literally loaded at
a party, have them click on the safety and tell
them to stick to something that will not fly two
miles into the atmosphere, fall to the earth at high speed,
and potentially embed itself in somebody's chest, back, shoulder, or skull.

(06:01):
It would be tragic if a fellow human being paid
a price for someone's carelessness, even as the shooter was
literally holding the smoking gun. And the science that we
have just learned about those hazardous projectile party favors is
a true story. True Stories podcast dot com