50 cal incident-Kansas City / not good!

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Where are the FACTS!!??

First of all the EMT was NOT shot with a .50 cal
Where this word is coming from is baffling.
They found .50 cal stuff among thousands of other rounds and other calibers.

"which fires cartridges 6 inches long and a half-inch in diameter"
WOW I wasn't aware the bullet was 6 inches long and .5"in diameter. Since that implies that the entire cartridge flies through the air

I just had an interesting talk with a local fireman friend of mine who knew one of the men who aswered the call.

He said none of the vehicles were hit with a .50 cal
It was scary and near pandemonium (sp) but it was not this setup deathtrap the news is spinning it out to be.

There is still no proof that any shots were purposely fired at anyone.. except the shots fired by the police into the house.

Sounds like a mini Ruby Ridge to me.
And I don't wear tin foil (it messed up my hair)
 
Hate to feed the paranoia, but it sounds like somebody loused up right proper, and it's being literally covered up.

What the nature of the louse-up is, I can't even begin to guess.

However, I have on first-hand report from a local firefighter who has been in a burning house WTIH rounds cooking off; He says what happens is the bullet stays put, and the lighter brass case actually pops off and flings at you. He could feel them hitting his fire jacket, that's about it.

Aparently the biggest danger comes from .22LR, since the case is so thin, it allows pressure to build and then rupture the case (instead of cleanly seperating) so some small shrapnel goes every which way. Every centerfire seems beefy enough to allow only slight neck expansion and venting.

Bigger cases simply build a few PSI, and then pop out before any bulk of powder has burned.

As we all know, powder BURNS, dosen't explode. ANd it burns in logarythmic proportion to ambient pressure. At atmospheric, it takes SECONDS to burn all of it, and it's quite booring. At 10,000PSI, the stuff is up in microseconds, and on it's way to making more pressure.



Nightcrawler, you were sort of right when you suggested velocity is a big component to lethality. It's V^2, and yes, that 'squared' matters A LOT!

I personally have never met anyone who took .50BMG fire to any part of their body, and has lived to tell me about it. I suspect there are a few (just as I suspect there are a few hit by 25mm chainguns that are still living.)

Honestly, the total ammount of energy transfer from a .50BMG hitting a person won't be that great. My bubba-dumbass guess would be that you'd transfer 5,000lb-ft at the most. (granted, that's still about THREE TIMES the energy that a .308 soft point that didn't exit transmits...)

Now, this wastes over 10,000lb-ft on the backstop, but still makes a world of hurt for the poor SOB. Hydrostatic shock from a torso hit alone will likely be enough to stop a human's heart. (just like it would be from a .338 Lapua that did not exit.)


.50BMG isn't any magic death ray, but it is one BIG friggin small arms round, and not something to be trifled with. It's carries at least three times the energy as it's nearest competitior (.338LM) and about 8 times the energy of a .308. Yeah, ow.

Put another way, it's like taking TWENTY .45ACP slugs to the chest.
 
artherd

Thank you for getting common sense back into the picture.

My experience with rounds that have detonated from fire is the shell will travel much further than the bullet will. From what I've seen with .38's is about five or six to one with almost no velocity. I have seen the case fly up in the air 15 feet with flame coming from the powder being ejected in flight.
 
Sounds to me like a buncha rounds were cooking off, somebody jumped the wrong way and yelled, "SNIPER!!!"

Next, you have a whole buncha hyped-up police officers who are just aching for the next "terrorist incident" so they can actually try out their new toys the way they're meant to be tried out.

In this purely hypothetical incident, the police are the only ones actually shooting aimed fire. All the rest of the "pop"s are coming from cookoffs. Somebody gets shot. The cops don't want to catch a buncha heat for panicking...so they bury everything.

Opinions?
 
Was a suspect in an arson and investigated following the Oklahoma City terrorist attack.

Third time's the charm?

"Sometimes they really are out to get you."
 
Wait- let's not argue against it being.50

Oh yes Sen Kennedy, the fireman was hit twice with a .50 and survived, they really aren't that deadly after all, Unlike your driving....
 
I suspect if this person was hit with a .50, it would have been national news in a heartbeat. With the Waco style bulldozing, something bad happened that the agencies involved do not want out. Probably nothing really nuts, but with suspects dead, any whoops could be quickly buried before the Depts come under scrutiny, and get into national trouble.
I doubt we will ever know what happened....:scrutiny:
 
Reader's Digest article

So this showed up in the March 2005 Reader's Digest, and the sequence of events would seem to support the claim that someone was shooting at the first responders before the police showed up.

Were there ever any sort of locally known facts that didn't seem to make it into the Reader's Digest article?
 
On one of the links that is posted to the first page of the thread you can download an audio file of the radio traffic from the incident.

About a minute in you can hear somebody ask if the "gunfire" is maybe cookoffs from the fire. Another voice responds with something like, "the firefighters say somebody is shooting a rifle." I don't know any firefighters I would trust to know the difference between ammo cooking off and rifle fire.

Later on you can hear a policewoman descibe an explosion and an end to the "gunfire."

Does anybody else think maybe the guy and his GF were already dead from smoke inhalation and FD rolled up just as his ammo cache started to cook off?

A bigtime gun enthusiast could easily have 10s of thousands of rounds in his residence (I hope to one day). Medic gets fragged with flying debris. Panicked firefighters call for help and cops show up to put "cover fire" down on a burning pile of ammo. Finally the rest of it goes up in an explosion and the "gunfire" stops.

They find the two charred bodies in bed, an astute department administrator figures out what likely happened, and the bulldozers roll.

Am I being paranoid? Because the story as laid out in the news article just doesn't make sense. Unless the guy was a psycho.

Anybody here from KC know the guy?
 
Remember, its been a year ago today, so my memory of it isnt all that great. So heres what I remember... (BTW I live in Wyandotte)

I turned on the news to see a helicopter flying above a house that was on fire. They were talking about how the house blew up, and as EMTs, firefighters, and officers arrived, shots started going off (or what sounded like shots). A few minutes later, they reported that officers saw a man shooting from behind a shed, and had apparently run off into the woods. A search was done for several hours, by air and land. Noone was found. After the fire was brought under control, two bodies were discovered, which later were identified as the owner of the house and his girlfriend.

Frm what ive heard, the initial explosion was very powerful, witnesses report FEELING it from a good distance away, along with the THR member that posted in this topic. Now, WHAT ARE THE CHANCES OF SOMEONE NOT EVEN 20 FEET FROM THE BLAST NOT ONLY SURVIVING IT, BUT IN A GOOD ENOUGH CONDITION TO FIRE AT OFFICERS?

There are several things that will set off a cartridge, shock, and heat being two. Both were present that day, especially heat from the flames. It is my opinion that by the time the officers began to resond, the fire had reached the area containing the ammunition.

Pipe bombs, like guns, are made out by the media to be evil devices only used by terrorists. Im a former pyro (technic), and although I though pipe bombs were a little too dangerous, I still dont think that you should automatically associate pipe bombs with terrorists.

The EMT that was wounded was hit twice in the chest, one I remember hearing grazed the heart.

I dont know a single person involved with this case FYI. This is just my thoughts and opinions on the day that happened late Feb. of last year.
 
from now on

Let me recommend anyone with interest in this case to save everythng you find on it: all pictures, audio files, movies, and stories.

If it is a cover up, alot of the initial pics etc will be zapped from the net.

Don't believe me: then try to find the pic of the tank with the flaming turret nozzle from Waco. It isn't available, and everywhere it is mentioned the pic that follows is that dreaded little red x, or some other version of 'used to be here'.

So save everything from every incident you think to do so from now on.

You never know.

C-
 
Can a cooked off round go through someone's chest? That's the thing that's got me stumped at the moment. Unless I've misunderstood earlier posters, I wouldn't expect a larger round to have the necessary energy, but I would have expected to read something if the medic had been shot with a .22
 
The news has long been known for sin, sex, and sensationalism. It's just another way to peak interest for ratings. We see things like this every day. How many times do news stations report things they can't verify?

In my opinion through shooting vegetables and fruits, I think a .50 passing through the center mass would cause some severe trauma beyond the 1/2 inch hole. If this lady was hit in the upper chest once and survive she should be thankful to be alive. If she was hit twice in the upper chest and survived, then that would be a miracle.
 
The only mention that the RD article made to the .50 is that the homeowner had loaded it. It is never mentioned again in the entire article.

According the the article, the medic was hit by shrapnel through her side after a bullet fragmented off of a tire rim. No mention of being hit a second time.

Possibilities:
1) She's hit by rounds cooking off.
2) She's hit by a stray shot.
3) The homeowner was shooting
4) There's a third bad guy

I don't generally belong to the aluminum foil had brigade, but I feel like the individual facts are not all fitting in with any of the above possibilities.
 
Good point Gordon!! Anything that was chambered and lying horizontal (or fell that way) would be full force.

The whole thing is very fishy... I kinda picture it like the others have -
Fire call, ems/fire shows up, cooked rounds go off, cops respond, kill homeowner(or smoke inhalation), leftover whatever bomb type stuff he had blewup then they realize they got a mess, and cover it up. Mighta been a mini waco! hate to think it but you just never know. The buldozer thing is a real kicker for me.

Guess they dont have to worry about dealing with him in court anymore huh. :confused:
 
Slimjim
Senior Member


Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Maryland.
Posts: 353

We really dont need stuff like this to be happening. Kinda makes you wonder if its people the anti's are hiring to do this.
Click to expand...

I've sometimes wondered this too.

I was also going to suggest that the "nut" might have had some of his guns loaded laying around the house.
 
I also forgot to mention that I heard that the guy had overdue taxes or something.

Also, they interviewed all the people living in the neighborhood and they had nothing but good to say about him, except one or two people.
 
I am amazed at gun folks here exchanging myths about the effectiveness of the .50 BMG. It does not blow you apart into big chunks as suggested, will not throw part of you in the next county, and will not necessarily kill you if you are shot with it. There is nothing magical about the .50. It abides by the same laws of physics as other calibers.
 
Translational Kinetic Energy (KE) = ½(mass)X(velocity)(velocity)
Linear Momentum (p) = (mass) X (velocity)

and neither is how a firearms amount of work (W) is quantified.
 
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