Celebratory Gunfire - Cultural References

Cultural References

The non-fiction U.S. cable television program MythBusters on the Discovery Channel covered this topic in Episode 50: "Bullets Fired Up" (original airdate: April 19, 2006). Special-effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman conducted a series of experiments to answer the question: "Can celebratory gunfire kill when the bullets fall back to earth?" Using pig carcasses, they worked out the terminal velocity of a falling bullet and had a mixed result, answering the question with all three of the show's possible outcomes: Confirmed, Plausible and Busted. They tested falling bullets by firing them from both a handgun and a rifle, by firing them from an air gun designed to propel them at terminal velocity, and by dropping them in the desert from an instrumented balloon. The "busted" result applied only to bullets traveling on a perfectly vertical trajectory, which tumble on the way down, creating turbulence that reduces terminal velocity. The "plausible" result was cited because they found it was very difficult to fire a bullet in near-ideal vertical trajectory, so bullets were likely to remain spin-stabilized on a ballistic trajectory and fall at a potentially lethal terminal velocity. The "confirmed" result related to their research which verified cases of actual deaths from falling bullets.