What happens to the bullets when a gun is fired into the air?

Answer 1

They come down somewhere. Depending on the gun, bullet type, wind, angle at time of triggering, and other conditions, it could drop anywhere within several miles.

Under really bad circumstances it could hit and injure or kill someone, but the odds are in the same range as winning the lottery.

Answer 2

When a gun is fired into the air the bullet travels up but it is slowing down because of air resistance, (imagine sticking your hand outside the car window while driving on the highway), and more so due to gravity. Eventually the bullet will come to a stop in the air and then begin to travel back down. This is just the same as if you throw a baseball into the air, it goes up, stops for a split second and comes back down.

The bullet will speed up as it falls towards the ground but thankfully it will only reach a maximum speed on its way down due to terminal velocity during free fall which is generally less than a 10th of the speed of when it left the gun. However this is still enough speed, and depending on the size of the bullet, it can cause serious or fatal injury if it were to land on someone, especially on the head.

So the moral of the story is: don't shoot guns into the air!

Answer 3

Most of the above answers are correct but all of them are boring, so I'd like to propose a scenario that probably wouldn't happen (but then again, how probable is the intersection of a 2 inch long bullet's path with a lady's leg 1 mile away?).

As you are loading the bullets into your gun, you sneeze all over the rounds. Dang. Thinking nothing of it, you go outside and shoot at a few target dummies anyway. Then you look up and spot a cloud in the shape of your ex-girlfriend, and you peal off a few rounds at the sky. Just as you do so, a flock of migrating birds flying south for the winter (this is why you had the sneeze to begin with) emerges overhead, and one of the bullets lodges in the leg of the alpha male in the V-formation. Since the alpha male has a greater tolerance for pain, he doesn't even swerve. The birds continue their flight all the way to the heart of the Amazon in South America. They happen to roost in the territory of a particularly hungry tribe of indigenous people, and the alpha male is eventually hunted, shot down with a blowgun, and eaten for dinner. Little to your knowledge, you didn't have a seasonal cold--you had a rare disease to which the indigenous people have absolutely no immunity. And it just so happens that these indigenous people live in the only place in the Amazon where a plant that could treat cancer grows. Since the explosion within the gun wasn't hot enough to kill the virus and since the eating of the bird would spark an epidemic among the tribe, killing virtually all of them, explorers in the jungle 20 years from now will never encounter that tribe and will never learn of the plant that might, or might have, cured cancer. Good job. Point is, it probably won't happen, but don't do stupid stuff like shoot your gun into the air.

Answer 4

Ultimately, they fall, since even the largest gun cannot fire a bullet that will sustain escape velocity and go into space.

Therefore, if you pop a few rounds in the air for New Years Eve, go inside immediately. Cause those slugs are gonna fall (usually from a substantial height) right back to the area they started from. By the time they return to ground level, they have regained enough speed to do some serious harm, bunky.

Firing into the air is not a smart idea.

Answer 5

The bullets come back again when they run out of force and gravity takes over.

I read some time ago that several people a year are killed in Mexico due to shooting guns into the air at celebrations (I didn't even know they did this).

Answer 6

When it reaches it height and can't escape gravity anymore, it will come back down to earth at a rate of 16 feet per second squared until it reaches terminal velocity... and since it doesn't have much drag and has weight, it will still be deadly.
Look at it this way... there are only three cases of people being hit by meteorites, or their property. One was a car, one was a house and one was a person. The odds are high that someone may get hit but it's still not a good chance to take.

Answer 7

As others have mentioned, it goes up in the ai but it is acted upon by the downward acceleration due to gravity so eventually it stops going up. When in reaches its maximum height and comes down, it will not have the velocity of a shot bullet but it will have the velocity determined by how far it has fallen. It will accelerate from zero velocity at its apex at the rate of 32 feet/sec/sec on its downward journey.

Answer 8

they go up and then they come down and land somewhere, at times injuring people. Not often though as bullets are actually rather light and the speed imparted to them by gravity alone is seldom enough to result in damage.

Answer 9

The Bullet rises and decelerates due to gravity until it falls Back to the ground.

Answer 10

they come back down to earth. Watch mythbusters they did an episode on shotting a gun into the air