A crowd of Libyans fired guns in the air and chanted slogans in support of Muammar Qaddafi at a rally in the city of Sirte on Monday. Isn’t it kind of dangerous to shoot bullets into the sky?
Yes … well, probably … maybe … it kind of depends. The Explainer is far from being the first to ask this question. Everyone from the U.S. military to The Straight Dope’s Cecil Adams has probed the lethality of falling bullets. That includes forensic scientists,
cardio-thoracic surgeons, and the hosts of the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters—which devoted nearly a whole episode to the matter. And yet, no one has been able to come up with a straightforward answer.
The general consensus is that a bullet fired straight up—at precisely 90 degrees to the horizontal—is unlikely to kill a healthy adult when it returns to Earth.
That’s because, on the way down, air resistance prevents the bullet from returning to its initial velocity. The bullet would deliver a painful wallop but could only have a chance of killing you with a direct hit to the eye, ear, or mouth.
