Where do bullets go when guns are fired into the air?

When people fire guns into the air in a celebratory manner, those bullets have to go somewhere. Find out how high fired bullets can go -- and why they can be dangerous -- in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Welcome to Brainstuff from how stuff works dot com where

(00:22):
smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, where
do bullets go when guns are fired straight up into
the air. You may have seen television programs where people
who are celebrating fire guns or pistols or machine guns

(00:46):
straight up into the air as part of the celebration,
the saying what goes up must come down as an
appropriate starting point for our conversation here. If you fire
a gun into the air, the bullet will travel up
to a mile high, depending on the angle of the
shot and the power of the gun. Once it reaches
its apogee, the bullet will fall. Air resistance limits its speed,

(01:10):
but bullets are designed to be fairly aerodynamic, so the
speed is still quite lethal. If the bullet happens to
hit someone in rural areas, the chance of hitting someone
is pretty remote because the number of people is low,
but in crowded cities the probability rises dramatically and people
get killed quite often by stray bullets. Therefore, most major

(01:32):
cities have laws in place to try to keep people
from shooting guns into the air in celebration. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, is It How
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