> Spike writes, regarding firing shots into the air:
> > In the event of such an attack, I figure a five hundred proles
> > squeeze off 10 rounds each to accumulate about a 50% chance
> > of a score, so we should expect about 5 deaths and 10 injuries
> > by falling bullets per shootfest. Let us hope it never comes to this.
>
> The article goes on to say that this is fast enough to penetrate the
> skin and potentially cause serious injury. But I doubt that you would
> kill someone hitting them on the top of the head with a bullet going
> only this fast. Hal
Drooges, there was a little girl killed by a falling bullet in San Jose a
couple
years ago. The proles fire guns skyward at midnight on New Years.
In the dozen years I have lived here, this is the first death. I intended
my estimate to be conservative (pessimistic) but after I posted I
thought of several reasons why my number would be more than
an order of magnitude too pessimistic. One of those is the point
you mention Hal. Another is that most of the proles would be
indoors or in a car, which would be sufficient to shield. Another
is that my neighborhood is denser than most, as I and my
neighbors are shall we say, capital challenged. Another
is the 30 by 30 cm square fatal region is probably pessimistic
by a factor of at least 20 by itself: probably more than 6 or 7
cm diameter region of possibly deadly area, this being on the
top of the head, and even then most likely would apply only
to something really heavy like rifled shotgun slugs. A typical
falling small caliber rifle bullet would likely have an insufficient
ballistic coefficient to slay. I revise my estimate to a death by
falling bullet being about as likely as downing the attacking aircraft,
which is to say, un.
spike
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