2aHawaii
General Topics => General Discussion => Topic started by: Teichi on September 22, 2012, 11:58:01 PM
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A car window was shattered today around noon by a 9mm bullet that ricocheted from the backstop area at the pistol range, over the firing line, and into the parking area fronting the pistol range. The bullet did not penetrate the safety glass and bounced under the adjacent car. It looked to be a 124gr FMJ. The bullet jacket was 100% intact, but showed heavy deformation from contact with basalt rock.
Shoot at only authorized targets.
Do not shoot at targets of opportunity on the rocky hill in back of the range.
Wear eye protection and a hat
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Pistol range still open?
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Range is still open as far as I know. Mike was writing up an accident report yesterday. and has the offending bullet.
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How far do you think the bullet had to ricochet?
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A 9mm bullet ricochet from the berm, over the roof of the pistol range and onto a parked car.
I just have a hard time believing that.
That's a hell of a lot of energy necessary for that.
What's more believable to me is that some kid picked up a bullet off the ground and threw it at a car.
I wasn't there so I don't know but that just seems more plausible to me.
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Me too. On the siloutte side you never see stuff bouncing back. I never have.
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A 9mm bullet ricochet from the berm, over the roof of the pistol range and onto a parked car.
I just have a hard time believing that.
That's a hell of a lot of energy necessary for that.
What's more believable to me is that some kid picked up a bullet off the ground and threw it at a car.
I wasn't there so I don't know but that just seems more plausible to me.
I agree. Maybe +P 9mm? Or some pissed off person.
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There might have been a considerable rotational energy left, though, and, say, an edge of the rotating bullet caught the glass just right.
I had plausibility issues with it, too, though, when I first read the thread. Did anyone report a ricochet "whang" when it happened? Have the people present at the time been questioned?
Any pix of the broken/cracked glass? Maybe the glass was just about ready to let go from stress-cracking when it got tapped by the bullet.
Terry, 230RN
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Are not most of the cars at a lower level than the shooters themselves? If the ricochet went over the range it had to be arcing over the range and on its way down which means it probably had little energy behind it. JMHO
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Yeah, this sounds pretty bogus to me.
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perhaps someone had a broken window and figured out a way to get it replaced for free. Hmmmm??
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after speaking to some buddies it is possible
Wanted Curving Bullets (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGZQi3ODB-U#)
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after speaking to some buddies it is possible
Anything is possible, but this story is just that... A story
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We need an engineer to opine on the subject. My thought are that if you can throw a bullet from the top of the hill down to a car below and crack a window, not a whole lot of speed is required
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Me too. On the siloutte side you never see stuff bouncing back. I never have.
Have you ever looked at the roof of the silhouette range. Many bullets and fragments up there. Ask any of the RO's about ricochet fragments.
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The own
perhaps someone had a broken window and figured out a way to get it replaced for free. Hmmmm??
The owner of the car is a loong time bullseye shooter and will not file a claim. He doesn't want the range shut down either. He was an old guy 30 years ago when I first met him.
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Are not most of the cars at a lower level than the shooters themselves? If the ricochet went over the range it had to be arcing over the range and on its way down which means it probably had little energy behind it. JMHO
This guy parks on the upper level when he can. Copper jacketed bullets are hard enough to cause side safety glass to shatter without the glass breaking tips found on so called tactical knives. I've seen 300fps BBs break car window glass.
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Anything is possible, but this story is just that... A story
And the moral of this "story" is....
Wear eye protection and a hat.
Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
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I've seen 300fps BBs break car window glass.
Sounds like experience!
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One bullet could have hit another bullet in the berm sending it flying up and over the roof. ?
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One bullet could have hit another bullet in the berm sending it flying up and over the roof. ?
Or there could have a mid air collision of two bullets due to two very skilled operatives "curving" their bullets, causing a catastrophic occurrence of such epidemic proportions that every window on every car within a ten mile radius was endangered.
We're just lucky that it was only one window.
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Have you ever looked at the roof of the silhouette range. Many bullets and fragments up there. Ask any of the RO's about ricochet fragments.
I haven't looked on that side as I don't typically go there. I have caught a ricochet before though on the HRA bay. 45 acp to the shin after shooting metal plates.
While I suppose it's possible to get a ricochet I too feel that it's asking a bit much unless as you (others) are thinking it was errant and hit something other than the soil berm in back of the targets.
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maybe.......there was a second shooter.........on the grassy knoll..........
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I've been standing in action bay 1 and had a ricochet from action bay 2 land at my feet with a pretty considerable "thunk." I'm thinking that this incident isn't as far-fetched as most of you believe.
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Time to call Myth busters
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Guess i gotta think about catching the bus the to range. Sorry, it's jus hard to believe.
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^ You can carry firearms on a bus?
Not that that glass breakage couldn't happen, it's just one of those weird things that one wonders about the chances involved and how they could happen. Like, as I mentioned, maybe the rotational energy was enough if the tumbling, spinning bullet happend to tap the glass by one side or the base of the bullet
Bullets do some weird things. There's long been a legend about bullets hitting ice and then sitting there spinning on the ice due to their intial rotation from the rifling. Trappers and mountain men have reported this phenomenon for a hundred(?) years and they were dismissed as mountain madness.
I've heard that one poo-pooed for decades and never bothered to try it, thinking it was pure BS.
But....
Pistol bullet
Spinning 9mm Bullet on Ice (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1btKoF_HZk#)
Coarse language warning:
Rifle bullet
Crazy bullet spinning on ice (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGM2sYRF06s#)
It's now a fairly well-known phenomenon. Use your favortie search engine for "bullets spinning on ice."
FYI (somebody's sure to ask) handgun bullets will spin out of the barrel anywhere from, say, 20,000 RPM to maybe 80,000 RPM. Rifles spin them up much faster than that, up to 250,000 RPM. An exact number can be calculated for your gun from the rifling twist and the muzzle velocity.
Terry, 230RN
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^ You can carry firearms on a bus?
Nope. I researched this for an article in the Hawaii Rifleman. The C&C rules governing TheBus prohibit it.
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A 9mm bullet ricochet from the berm, over the roof of the pistol range and onto a parked car.
I just have a hard time believing that.
That's a hell of a lot of energy necessary for that.
What's more believable to me is that some kid picked up a bullet off the ground and threw it at a car.
I wasn't there so I don't know but that just seems more plausible to me.
I agree
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Earth and gravel backstops soak up the FMJs better that hard rock. FMJ bullets are notorious for ricochets. That is why I tell people not to shoot at the rocks above and behind the backstop. I'll even turn mean RO on them if they keep shooting at the rocks for fun. It is not a safe practice.
I was able to find the offending bullet by analyzing the impact and fracture pattern of the broken glass. The surface layer was broken in a spider web pattern, but smaller fragmenting was located on the 5 o'clock position indicating that the projectile impacted from a high angle from centerline or right side of the pistol range. The bullet was located under the adjacent car at a position that confirmed my estimate of the origin.
Just because you've haven't seen it happen doesn't make it not true.
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^ You can carry firearms on a bus?
Not that that glass breakage couldn't happen, it's just one of those weird things that one wonders about the chances involved and how they could happen. Like, as I mentioned, maybe the rotational energy was enough if the tumbling, spinning bullet happend to tap the glass by one side or the base of the bullet
Bullets do some weird things. There's long been a legend about bullets hitting ice and then sitting there spinning on the ice due to their intial rotation from the rifling. Trappers and mountain men have reported this phenomenon for a hundred(?) years and they were dismissed as mountain madness.
I've heard that one poo-pooed for decades and never bothered to try it, thinking it was pure BS.
But....
Pistol bullet
Spinning 9mm Bullet on Ice (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1btKoF_HZk#)
Coarse language warning:
Rifle bullet
Crazy bullet spinning on ice (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGM2sYRF06s#)
It's now a fairly well-known phenomenon. Use your favortie search engine for "bullets spinning on ice."
FYI (somebody's sure to ask) handgun bullets will spin out of the barrel anywhere from, say, 20,000 RPM to maybe 80,000 RPM. Rifles spin them up much faster than that, up to 250,000 RPM. An exact number can be calculated for your gun from the rifling twist and the muzzle velocity.
Terry, 230RN
If it hits the ice shouldn't the bullet be deformed? The vids looks like the bullet was spun like a top.
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http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/38569-mythbusters-triple-ricochet-video.htm (http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/38569-mythbusters-triple-ricochet-video.htm)
The one in a million chance ricochet is possible, as I'm sure more than a million bullets were fired at the range. Bullet could have hit a rock or bullet on the backstop, ricocheted up on some rocks, and come back over. I'm sure it happens occasionally but ends up in the grass.
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Nope. I researched this for an article in the Hawaii Rifleman. The C&C rules governing TheBus prohibit it.
Someone else asked the same question in another thread regarding transportation of a firearm on the bus. Tom is correct that it is prohibited to transport weapons on TheBus. A bus driver will not ask a passenger to disclose the contents of a bag. Just saying.
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If it hits the ice shouldn't the bullet be deformed? The vids looks like the bullet was spun like a top.
I agree about the deformation part, which I can't figure out. Maybe ice has some special little-known property under high impact velocities that makes it act like a sheet of rubber or something, then the bullet just sits there using up its considerable rotational energy.
As I said, this phenomenon has been reported for a long time, but was usually dismissed as being tall tales by mountain men, who are generally a little bit dotty anyhow. After all, who would voluntarily trudge around the mountains all winter in "ten feet of snow and twenty below" except someone who was a bit "off" in the head? :)
But with the advent of the internet and portable video cameras, it has been sufficiently documented, to my mind, to qualify as a real phenomenon worthy of real physicists' attention.
After all, one of the parameters of scientific investigation is that the experiment has to be repeatable by independent observers. It's conceivable that some kind of fraud has been perpetrated by a succession of tricksters... maybe they hid a set of induction motor coils under the water in the previous fall, ha-ha, but the bullets don't have to spin vertically. Some of them just lie there and spin on their sides.
But Mythbusters dug around up in a frozen lake in a snowstorm to verify it. They had difficulties, but they also reported it via video. I basically tend to trust Mythbusters:
MythBusters S09E07 Spinning Bullet (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHrBm8C3WEE#ws)
Why trust them? Because they've got a good thing going with their experimentation, and I don't think they'd ruin that by perpetrating fraud.
As far as I can tell, there aren't many places in Hawaii where you yourselves could repeat these experiments.
Again, I had heard about this decades ago from a buddy of mine who said he had seen it happen with his own baby-blue eyes, and I thought he was putting me on, so I just let it go, even though there were occasional other reports of it I had read about.
However, repetition, even by "unqualified" observers, and even by "anecdotal" reports, makes me pretty damned sure I was wrong by not believing it in the first place.
After all, lets face it. At root, all science is ultimately based on initial anecdotes.
Maybe very cold ice does act like a tough rubber sheet under high impact velocities.
In which case, maybe I'll invent a flak jacket made out of ice. :thumbsup:
Terry, 230RN
AFTERTHOUGHT ON THE BULLET DEFORMATION QUESTION (Optional reading): Strange things do happen with high-velocity impacts. For example, did you ever wonder how come most of the craters on the moon are circular? It should be obvious that not all impacts come from directly above, or perpendicular to the moon's surface, yet the overwhelming majority of them are circular. Very few of them are oval or elliptical shapes, as may be expected from the number of objects hitting it at an angle.
The answer lies in the fact that the shock waves from the initial impact radiate outward in a circular (or shperical) pattern far faster than the speed of sound in the moon's material, so the crater formed is usually circular. Only objects hitting the moon at very low angles (I think it was 20° or less) form oval craters.
So it seems possible to me that the initial shock wave of the bullet's impact proceeds through the ice, shattering it in advance of the bullet's travel, forming a dense mush which slows it down quickly but without deforming it. After all, it's not like hitting a steel plate, where the tensile strengths of both the plate and the bullet are roughly equal. Just a theory. Which is why I think real physicists shuld be interested in the phenomenon.
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If it hits the ice shouldn't the bullet be deformed? The vids looks like the bullet was spun like a top.
We've recovered bullets from bowling pins that were not (significantly) deformed.
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sounds like some kaa kaa pee pee... but hey I wasn't dea... ??? ??? ;D :P :thumbsup:
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We've recovered bullets from bowling pins that were not (significantly) deformed.
Thought you bowled with a ball? Why would you bowl using bullets? :rofl:
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sounds like some kaa kaa pee pee... but hey I wasn't dea... ??? ??? ;D :P :thumbsup:
Bro come on, that's not even nice.
Lets stick with proper terminology.
It would be more politically correct to say "caca poopoo"
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Thought you bowled with a ball? Why would you bowl using bullets? :rofl:
If you've never bowled with bullets, you've never bowled!
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A car window was shattered today around noon by a 9mm bullet that ricocheted from the backstop area at the pistol range, over the firing line, and into the parking area fronting the pistol range. The bullet did not penetrate the safety glass and bounced under the adjacent car. It looked to be a 124gr FMJ. The bullet jacket was 100% intact, but showed heavy deformation from contact with basalt rock.
Shoot at only authorized targets.
Do not shoot at targets of opportunity on the rocky hill in back of the range.
Wear eye protection and a hat
Hope it works out for the car owner!
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Nope. I researched this for an article in the Hawaii Rifleman. The C&C rules governing TheBus prohibit it.
Can you show me a link?
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Can you show me a link?
Nope. The rules in question don't exist online. I never actually SAW a hardcopy. But I did spend a few days on the phone before I found someone who had a copy, and she read the section to me.
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Nope. The rules in question don't exist online. I never actually SAW a hardcopy. But I did spend a few days on the phone before I found someone who had a copy, and she read the section to me.
Thanks =). New project.
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Bro come on, that's not even nice.
Lets stick with proper terminology.
It would be more politically correct to say "caca poopoo"
Bah... kids maybe look at dis... hear you, all potty talk from now on....my bad...
****Laying down newspaper***** lol...
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Chris, did a little quick digging through the Honolulu Revised Ordinances and only found this section
Carrying or possessing any flammable, combustible, explosive, corrosive, or highly toxic liquid or
other substance, article or material which is likely to cause harm to others or to emit any foul or
noxious dust, mist, fume, gas, vapor, or odor; provided that nothing contained in this subdivision shall
be construed as prohibiting a person from carrying or possessing any match or any cigar, cigarette, or
pipe lighter, which is not lighted or smoldering;
Doesn't seem like firearms or ammo would fall under that. Good luck with your research.
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That might be addressed in the bus company, transportation district (or whatever) rules, rather than the statutes. Or in the Department of Transportation rules (which may govern trucks and orther commercial traffic.) Whether that has the force of law would be another question.
I'm not on solid ground by stating this becuase I usually avoid public transportation, but the Regional Transportation District out here (commonly called RTD, which runs the bus and light rail system) seems to be a quasi-governmental organization whose service area overlaps several cities and counties.
They (RTD, here) recently started putting biiiig signs over the left hand turn signal areas of the buses warning that you must yield to the bus when pulling out with its signals on, and conclude in biiiiig-assed lettering, "It's the Law." When they started that, I wondered, "What law?" but I never researched it. If indeed that's "The Law," it seems kind of dangerous in terms of traffic rules, since the buses now have "carte blanche" to just haul ass out of a bus stop and screw you, the mere mortal behind it.
So. Maybe you ought to contact your bus outfit or commercial traffic regulatory agency directly, although I warn you in advance that whoever you contact may well lie about it so demand specific citations.
And the phrase "article or material which is likely to cause harm to others" is, once again, so vaguely worded that I wonder about its enforceability. "Likely?" If I go to the supermarket and incidentally pick up a can of Drano and a couple of those small propane tanks for my little Bernz soldering torch, or a can of lighter fluid for my Zippo along with my milk and hamburger, can I carry them home on the bus?
Or do I have to Hazmat them home by Fedex or something?
Too often I have seen "laws" which can only interpreted in terms of "Oh, you know what I mean."
Well, no. Criminal laws are supposed to be specifically written, I am told.
"Likely," indeeed.
Terry, 230RN
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sounds like some kaa kaa pee pee... but hey I wasn't dea... ??? ??? ;D :P :thumbsup:
Ca-ca-poo-poo-pee-pee on the original article about the car window breaking, or on my theorizing about deformation, or the apparent reality of bullets spinning on ice?
I'm not a mind reader, and if your remark is meant as feedback on my posts, I'd like to know, in order to correct any deficiencies therein.
???
Terry, 230RN
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DOUBLE POST :(