America & World IV: Trump's Taxing Day

[Neon Ignition]

Geography fail Tucson is as close as I've ever got apparently

[fishbowlhead]

Guys, we might need to rethink that gun we were going to give to Fishbowlhead as a gift.

Ha. Honestly though this was a failure on every level. Even a basic visual check would of told Baldwin, or anyone, that it had rounds with bullets in the gun.

[monel]

As a side note, I have always wondered - when a bullet is fired into the air, can it kill someone on the way down? Maybe it doesn't get enough velocity on the fall back down.
.

Pretty sure people have been injured or killed in this way. At least that it's been reported to avoid doing this.

[MartyG]

No - Mythbuster were all over this in an episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzNNaaxdJho

If a bullet maintains its ballistic trajectory fired at an angle, then yes, but if a bullet is fired upward, then no because it's falling, not on a ballistic trajectory.

[monel]

Shooting bullets in the air, corrected.

That definitely was a myth then, but usually presented as physics.

[MartyG]

It's got to be straight up tho, as if it can maintain the ballistic trajectory, it'll maintain its velocity and spin and be ouchy.

Either way, firing bullets in the air is stupid.

[fishbowlhead]

Righty oh, well its a lot less stupid than just straight up shooting someone isn’t it, if your in the middle of nowhere you can pretty safely fire a gun off into the distance.

[randombs]

Imagine firing a blank to test and that blank gets lodged in the barrel. Yikes.

[MartyG]

Righty oh, well its a lot less stupid than just straight up shooting someone isn’t it, if your in the middle of nowhere you can pretty safely fire a gun off into the distance.

Can you? You can see the entire distance a bullet can travel and know you'll not hit anything? No you absolutely cannot do that.

[Brad]

Weeeellllll, you can see for about 3 miles on a clear day and the effective range of a 9mm pistol is probably a mile tops, so yes you could, depending on the weapon, conditions and environment

[monel]

You couldn't see a ghost. Or an alien hunter with a cloaking device. Or a human at night maybe. Or a cat because they're short.

[MartyG]

Pretty sure shooting weapon in random direction without knowing where a bullet can end up can not in anyway be described as a safe thing to do.

Safer than shooting a someone up close, sure, as in safer walking in front of a car doing 30 mph rather than 50 mph.

[monel]

Edit. Forgot the recent case in the news

[Brad]

I'm not saying you should do it. Why would you? But, for example, snipers are trained to do literally this; to know exactly where a bullet will end up at distances of up to a couple of miles (I think the record is just over 2 miles) just by using their human eyes.

[MartyG]

I don't dispute trained snipers with military scopes can hit a target miles away - but that's apples vs lumps of coal.

I dispute firing a weapon in a random direction is safe, especially by the sort of folk who are likely to fire weapons in random directions.