Groom hit with bullet fired into the air ...

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akanotken

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Just saw this story. I wonder if the bullet hit him on the way up (believable) or on the way down (what ARE the odds, something like a billion to one).

A while back, I looked into the speed a bullet would have falling back to the earth, and ~300 ft/sec was an estimate I saw. (est of terminal velocity)


"Groom Shot in Head During Wedding
26 minutes ago Add Oddly Enough - Reuters to My Yahoo!



NEW DELHI (Reuters) - An Indian groom is in a coma in hospital after he was accidentally shot in the head by a friend who was celebrating the wedding by firing into the air, police said on Tuesday.



Software engineer Tapesh Kumar Singh, 22, was sitting next to his bride when his friend shot him with a revolver at the alcohol-laden wedding bash on the outskirts of New Delhi on Sunday, Superintendent of Police Vijay Bhushan said.


"It was a tragic accident and very unusual. The whole incident was filmed on video and we are using this as evidence," Bhushan told Reuters.


Singh's friend, who had been firing shots in the air to celebrate the wedding, has been arrested for causing grievous injury by negligence, Bhushan said.


Some people in India, especially in the country's north, fire in the air to celebrate weddings or the birth of a son. "
 
(what ARE the odds, something like a billion to one).
Click to expand...
Much shorter odds, I think. Seems like a lot of people get hit by falling bullets every year around New Year's and the Fourth of July, and I doubt that billions of rounds are fired into the air during those times.... :D
 
Neither the first nor the last.

Folks who want to shoot into the air should use muzzleloaders. Good charge of powder & a paper wad. You get smoke & muzzle blast & a ka-boom from your thunder stick without anyone going comatose.

Psss. Don't use the ramrod. Someone could be impaled. :uhoh: I think Rifleman Harris did that at the Bridge at Coa. Shot his ramrod into a Frenchman, turned to run and grabbed his fallen sergeant's rifle to continue in the fight.
 
Although it's certainly not impossible, and in an infinite universe all that is possible is inevitable (or some such mumbo-jumbo) the article doesn't specifically say he fired the round up and it fell on the groom. I'd say it's more likely he was firing a revolver in the air and one of the shots was fired while the revolver, rather than pointing into the air, was pointing at the groom's head. Probably a combination of poor muzzle control and poor trigger control.
 
A while back, I looked into the speed a bullet would have falling back to the earth, and ~300 ft/sec was an estimate I saw. (est of terminal velocity)

What is this? Unless you are shooting up into the air from the top of a building, the speed in the downward direction will equal the speed in the upward direction at any elevation in the flight path (basic conservation of energy). Terminal velocity would only come in to play if the bullet continued to fall beyond it's launching point.
 
it doesn't work like that because energy is not conserved - it bleeds off into drag. The chemical energy in the propellant is transformed into a high initial velocity on the way up, which soon drops off. When the bullet stops and starts on down again it is beginning from zero speed and only has gravity to accelerate it, and it reaches a steady velocity when gravity is balanced by drag (or retardation, if you like). For a .30-06 type cartridge (for example) the upwards journey takes about 10 seconds and the downwards one about 50 seconds.
 
and these are the people who have nuclear weapons?
ahh nevermind, we have people like that here too in the US.
i guess stupidity is universal. ;)
 
yup,,,

trenton ,nj, new years eve, midnite, sounded like a war zone.

i often wondered where all them rounds went when they came back down, and if it could be a hazard...

guess so,,,

mental note: personal armor next time we celebrate in trenton...:what:

and

uh oh...

i was reading through the link above and under the "most powerful handgun" question the author refers to a muzzle "break"

eveidently he didn't see the recent thread on that here at thr:uhoh:
 
Back in the 1920's, Major Julian Hatcher of the Army Ordnance Corps ran experiments with bullets fired directly upward. He used a M1917 machine gun, set up to fire truly vertically, with the impact zone being some mud flats at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

Hatcher found out that all the bullets returned to earth BASE FIRST. (He was using .30/06 bullets, where the aerodynamic center of drag is in front of the center of mass.

He also estimated that the impact energy of these bullets returning to earth was low enough that a soldier equipped with the old WWI "cereal bowl" helmet would be protected against serious injury.

I believe (not positive without re-reading "Hatcher's Notebook") that the terminal velocity was in the range of 300fps.
 
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