How Do Guns Knock People Off Their Feet?

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That video in the OP doesn't show poop
.
LookAtYou said:
This is a minor example, as other reports of shootings have witnesses that say the victim was blown from the sidewalk to a porch (so at least a couple feet).
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And that's also bull poop.

During a lifetime in which I've seen some humans shot with 12-gauge shotguns, 5.56 MM rifles, .30 caliber (and a .50 cal) rifles, 9mm, .40 S&W and .45 ACP pistols, .30 and .50 cal machine guns, 40mm grenades, hit by M33 and M67 grenades... never seen anyone blown up OFF their feet. I did see a guy in a bar fight once get smacked in the face with a Louisville Slugger and his feet <seemed> to fly out forward in front of his body, but he'd had momentum charging toward the guy who took him out.
 
2:49 in this video is one way.



Might want to put center of mass a bit more forward, with that one.
 
Early in my muzzle loading journey, I was yakkin with my friend while charging 110 grains of powder in a .54 CVA Hawken and neither of us caught the double charge until I hit the second trigger and got my butt launched off the bench. We laughed a bit about how stupid that was and about 5 rounds later my friend did it. We called it a day and tended to our bruises. Had we hit something with that big chunk of lead it might have gotten knocked half as hard as we did.
 
One of my "bibles" when I was a cop was the book Street Survival and it had info about a very good demonstration on bullet impacts on people sized solid targets. They had a 200lb target mounted on a small platform on wheels... you could move it with only a finger pushing.. Impacts from 12ga shotguns didn't move that dummy a fraction of an inch (it was designed to absorb any projectiles so that all the bullet's energy was spent on impact..). 'Nuff said...
 
I'll tell you how. A few years in Bastrop, TX an idiot gave a little boy a 454 Casull. When the kid fired it, the barrel came back and smacked him in the head. It killed him. I think it was a fracture and a bleed in the skull before they could get him to help.
 
Space Ghost said:
Movie magic. I've even seen a haji take a hit to the melon from a .50 BMG in Iraq, and he didn't fly back. Just dropped like a bag of soup. Of course, he had a lower jaw, tongue, and that was it... but no dramatic TV recoil flying backwards...





Just kidding. He couldn't fly back. He was driving a VBIED at the time. My point is, a fast moving bullet will just tear it's way through, not push you backwards.
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The Steven Hunter Bob Lee Swagger books started out pretty good in relation to firearms, and even were decent in the recent releases.

But the one with the .50s throwing people 15 feet in the air really aggravated me (Snipers Honor?). He also made a big mistake with ballistics later, I can't recall exactly but something with a .308.
 
If it's not the force of the bullet ... what makes this happen?

In the movies, the stunt guy wears a harness under his clothes attached to a wire that is pulled to jerk him off his feet when the prop gun is fired.

The wire is usually out of sight of the camera or the wire may be erased by editing the video.
 
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Startle one’s opponent half to death, perhaps? Who needs guns? Use a lizard to absolutely devastate an opponent.



These devastating defensive lizards are available at one’s local Petsmart, here in SE Texas. Laws in other states may vary.

To keep this post on topic, one of my LE colleagues told me that a car burglar reacted somewhat like this, when he looked through the (closed) window of a surveillance van, on a dark night, and suddenly realized he was looking into the muzzle of a pistol. No shot was fired; the burglar was startled into a rearward leap that send him tumbling onto and over an adjacent car, and then falling all over himself as he scrambled to get back onto to his feet.
 
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From having witnessed Marines, NVA soldiers, and Vietcong being shot I would speculate that it is caused by the following causes.

1. Human reflex to pull the body away from a forceful impact.
2. Loss of balance cause by #1 and the sheer shock of being shot.
3. Loss of balance caused by nervous system injury alone or in combination with either #1 or #2 or both.
 
I had a VHS tape years ago that looked at bullet impacts on various things such as car bodies and doors. Even shot a car fuel tank (with gas) with normal bullets and tracers (no fire).

One of the segments had the host wearing level IV body armor. He had a partner shoot him in the chest with an FAL in 308. He also stood on one foot while taking the shot. He never lost his balance.
 
MechAg94 said:
One of the segments had the host wearing level IV body armor. He had a partner shoot him in the chest with an FAL in 308. He also stood on one foot while taking the shot. He never lost his balance.
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As mentioned in the video, if the bullet had the energy to knock you down, it would have the energy to knock down the person firing it.
 
SGW Gunsmith said:
These "jerk-weeds" who think it's cute to hand their 110 pound girlfriend, or a youngster, a hard recoiling firearm, ought to be castrated with a rusty scalpel. Not funny, just a stupid ploy by a low-life excuse for a human.
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Sorry, but that's a ridiculous and even unintelligent statement unless you put some qualifiers in there.

My youngest son has been shooting a .375 H&H since he was 10.

Many years ago I had an 90 lb girlfriend that regularly shot my .338 Win Mag as well as a Mossberg 500 slug gun with 3 inch magnums.

They both knew exactly what to expect when I handed the weapons to them and had worked up to it by shooting lighter recoiling guns.

You don't have to weigh 200 pounds or have a "Y" chromosome to handle recoil.

(To keep my post at least tangentially related to the thread, I'll say that neither of the above shooters was knocked over).
 
^^^^No, it's not, and our local elementary school football teams have some 10 year old's who are quite well built for that age. So that should also be a consideration. Just seems to me to be an excellent way to dissuade young folks and slightly built women from enjoying shooting, when that could easily be done with a much better controllable firearm.
Case in point, GEM's Post #32. My kids and grandkids learned to enjoy shooting using .22 rimfire, and really enjoyed the experience, without any bruises inflicted.
 
JR24 said:
In my experience a wounded, especially fatally, deer runs to the least convenient place for me to drag them out of.

Oh, there's a ravine/pond/thicket/steep slope near by? Yeah, it'll die there.
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The last time I had a disagreement with
a fellow about that was when his party had
shot a deer and they couldn't find it.
Well the neighborly proper thing to do is to
help them look. It wasn't 5 minutes and
we found a sparse blood trail leading away
from where they said they looked. The
big man in charge stopped everything and
declared that " wounded deer always take
the path of least resistance " . I knew right
then they were FOS and he refused any
further assistance. He also quoted the old
" headed straight for water " thing too.
If I hadn't been my buddy's guest I'd have
told him to go and &*$%^# himself and
went and found the deer
 
AlexanderA said:
If you look at film of U.S. Army firing squad executions of spies and war criminals during / after WW2, they drop like sacks of potatoes. You don't see them thrown backwards.
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Yes ^ ^ ^
I don't remember when or where. Years
back there was one of those deals that
made it on television where the criminal
came out of the building with a gun to
his head (357?) and the cops were in the
process of talking to him and he splattered
his brains on the TV news.
He did fall straight down, his head didn't
move, and the gun didn't fly away.
He just went straight to the ground as if
a switch was flipped
 
My Mossberg Ulti-Mag with Federal 3 1/2"/2 1/4 oz Magnum Turkey Loads won't knock me off me feet but will cause me to readjust my glasses after every shot. And there is some minor bodily fluid seepage. Not saying where.
 
...then what makes this happen? Because it clearly happens. Here is a (graphic) example (It happens within first 3 secs).
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In the video, the 'shootee' was already moving away from the shooter when shot. The bullet appears to have disabled his lower body so his feet stopped working when the bullet hit but his body continued moving in the direction it was moving before he was shot. That resulted in him falling away from the shooter based on momentum. He basically kept moving the same direction he was moving before he was shot.
 
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