08/21/2011

I’ve often wondered about this,what with all the videos coming out of Libya and the Middle East,and also having spent more than one New Year’s Eve in American cities where this custom is adhered to on certain holidays. Here are some statistics from Wikipedia:
Bullets fired into the air usually fall back at speeds much lower than those at which they leave the barrel of a firearm. Nevertheless, people are injured, sometimes fatally, when bullets discharged into the air fall back down. The mortality rate among those struck by falling bullets is about 32%, compared with about 2% to 6% normally associated with gunshot wounds.^[5] The higher mortality is related to the higher incidence of head wounds from falling bullets.
A study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 80% of celebratory gunfire-related injuries are to the head, feet, and shoulders.^[6] In the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, about two people die and about 25 more are injured each year from celebratory gunfire on New Year’s Eve, the CDC says.^[3] Between the years 1985 and 1992, doctors at the King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, treated some 118 people for random falling-bullet injuries. Thirty-eight of them died.^[7] Kuwaitis celebrating in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War by firing weapons into the air caused 20 deaths from falling bullets.^[7]
Firearms expert Julian Hatcher studied falling bullets and found that .30 caliber rounds reach terminal velocities of 300 feet per second (90 m/s) and larger .50 caliber bullets have a terminal velocity of 500 feet per second (150 m/s).^[8] A bullet traveling at only 150 feet per second (46 m/s) to 170 feet per second (52 m/s) can penetrate human skin,^[9] and at 200 feet per second (60 m/s) it can penetrate the skull.^[10] A bullet that does not penetrate the skull may still result in an intracranial injury.^[11]
In 2005, the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) ran education campaigns on the dangers of celebratory gunfire in Serbia and Montenegro.^[12] In Serbia, the campaign slogan was “every bullet that is fired up, must come down.”[
Notable incidents

• December 1859: An autopsy showed that a native servant in India, who suddenly fell dead for no aMFarent reason, was mortally wounded from a bullet fired from a distance too far for the shot to be heard. The falling bullet had sufficient energy to pass through the victim's shoulder, a rib, a lung, his heart and his diaphragm.^[17]
• December 31, 1994: A tourist from Boston was killed by a falling bullet from celebratory firing while walking on the Moonwalk in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. The Police Department there has been striving to educate the public on the danger since then, frequently making arrests for firing into the air.^[18]
• January 1, 1996: A grandmother in Detroit named Sandra Latham was killed on New Year’s Day from bullet from celebratory firing as she sat in her living room.
• July 22, 2003: More than 20 people were reported killed in Iraq from celebratory gunfire following the deaths of Saddam Hussein‘s sons Uday and Qusay in 2003.^[16]
• December 31, 2004: A 75-year-old man in Orlando, Florida, was mortally wounded in the heart from a falling bullet just before midnight. Police later traced the fatal bullet to a gun confiscated from a man firing into the air more than a mile away. The shooter was charged with manslaughter.^[19]
• January 1, 2005: A stray bullet hit a young girl during New Year celebrations in the central square of downtown Skopje, Macedonia. She died two days later. This incident led to the 2006 IANSA awareness campaign in that country.^[1]
• December 28, 2005: A 23-year-old U.S. Army private on leave after basic training fired a 9 mm pistol into the air in celebration with friends, according to police, and one of the bullets came through a fifth-floor apartment window in the New York City borough of Queens, striking a 28-year-old mother of two in the eye. Her husband found her lifeless body moments later. The shooter had been drinking the night before and turned himself in to police the next morning when he heard the news. He was charged with second-degree manslaughter and weapons-related crimes,^[20][21] and was later found guilty and sentenced to four to 12 years in prison.^[22]
• February 25, 2007: Five people were killed by stray bullets fired at a kite festival in Lahore, Pakistan, including a 6-year-old schoolboy who was struck in the head near his home in the city’s Mazang area.^[23]
• July 29, 2007: At least four people were reported killed and 17 others wounded by celebratory gunfire in the capital city of Baghdad, Iraq, following the victory of the national football team in the AFC Asian Cup,^[24][25] Celebratory gunfire occurred despite warnings issued by Iraqi security forces and the country’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who forbade the gunfire with a religious fatwā.^[26]
• January 1, 2010: A 4-year-old boy was killed shortly after midnight while sitting in church during a midnight service in an Atlanta suburb. The cause of death was thought first to be due to falling ceiling debris until an autopsy confirmed an intracranial bullet injury to be the culprit.
  

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.^[30] 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 droMFing them in the desert from an instrumented balloon. The “busted” result aMFlied 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”
Certainly not as many casualties as I would have thought,however getting hit on the head with a less than terminal velocity must give you an aweful headache,pass me those BC powders please!