![]() ![]() Upper-lip skin is 50 percent thicker than cheek skin, for example. Skin thickness varies significantly from person to person, and in different places on the same individual. The broad range depends on several factors, like how pointy the bullet is and which part of the body it strikes. ![]() Based on hundreds of years of shooting at pigs, oxen, and human cadavers-not to mention ballistics gel and other objects-munitions experts estimate that a bullet must be traveling at least 200 feet per second (or 136 miles per hour) in order to break the skin, although one traveling as fast as 330 feet per second (225 mph) might bounce off your body under certain circumstances. Why has this question confounded so many experimenters over the years? (British and German soldiers were firing vertical test shots way back in 1909, and American servicemen did it in World War I.) In part, because it’s impossible to calculate the exact minimum velocity required for a bullet to perforate the skin. 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. That’s because, on the way down, air resistance prevents the bullet from returning to its initial velocity. 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. And yet, no one has been able to come up with a straightforward answer. 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. military to The Straight Dope’s Cecil Adams has probed the lethality of falling bullets. The Explainer is far from being the first to ask this question. Yes … well, probably … maybe … it kind of depends. Isn’t it kind of dangerous to shoot bullets into the sky? 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. ![]()
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