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Charles L. Cotton wrote:

ScottDLS wrote:

Vol Texan wrote:I hope they find the idiot who did this:

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/ho ... =fb-pemium

Just a few moments into the New Year, Javier Sruarez Rivera stood in his driveway with his wife to watch fireworks burst in the night sky, listening to their pops mingled with the sounds of unseen neighbors shooting guns into the air.

As he looked up, a bullet came down.

Rivera collapsed, falling backward onto the concrete, blood pouring from a wound to his head. Inside his house, 18 family members, who had been sharing midnight hugs and handshakes, heard his wife's screams for someone to call 911.

. . . I believe in most cases terminal velocity for a falling object is about 120 fps or 154 mph. A roughly straight up until it falls back bullet would have lost it's spin and lateral velocity (if any). I guess if it hit you in the eye...or soft tissue of the neck... I highly suspect "defilade" fire. In other words more lateral from a higher vertical location...or maybe even someone with evil intent shooting while covered by celebratory fireworks. . . .

Free-falling rounds simply do not have the energy to penetrate the skull or significantly deep into soft tissue. As The Wall noted, Myth Busters did a segment on this sometime back.

This is terribly sad and so preventable. I hope the person who did this is caught and prosecuted.

Chas.

But Charles, Mythbusters tested literally free-falling rounds that were fired vertically up and came down vertically. Shots fired at an angle into the air can easily carry enough velocity to kill someone far enough away that the shot is never heard - as demonstrated by the two cases I illustrated above. Both patients were hit by rounds fired from far enough away that nobody heard the shot.

The Wall wrote:They had this on Myth Busters. Basically they showed that if you shoot straight up into the air it won't kill you. If you shoot it at an angle other than straight up it could have enough velocity to injure or kill depending on the angle. Not something anyone should be doing regardless.

I have personally worked on two such patients, in the space of one New Years Eve. The first came to our ER in the afternoon, after having a .45 230 grain FMJ come down through the ragtop of his jeep, striking him in the thigh and breaking his femur, while he sat at a red light at a major Pasadena intersection. The second patient was brought to us late that night. She had been hit by a .223 caliber bullet in the top of her left shoulder. The bullet transited through her left chest/lung, through her diaphragm, through her left abdomen, holing her bowel in multiple places and her spleen in the process, bounced to the right off her inner left pelvis, destroyed her bladder, bounced upwards off her inner right pelvis, and came to rest in the dome of her liver. 14 hours of surgery and 24 units of blood later, she lives.

People who celebrate their alcohol problems by firing their guns into the air near population centers should be made to dance while others shoot at their feet......until they run out of ammo.....which in my case could take a long time....