is it recoil and is it real?

Question

I heard recently that when a bullitt from a gun hits a victim it wold not actually make the victim fly back/forward. instead the person would just fall in which ever direction it was going with no extra force. Meaning this was solely made up to look good in films etc. Not sure what this effect is called. its not recoil but i can't think of a suitable word. i've never seen enough people getting shot to tet the experiment...

Answer 1

Depends on mass, and speed of the bullet and whether its energy is released into the body. If the bullet is stopped or slowed significantly, then that means most of the energy of the bullet was expended into the body - that energy sometimes causing the blow-back effect, or causing catastrophic wounds. If the bullet is not slowed at all by the body, then little energy is expended and hence no blow-back effect. Simple conservation of momentum.

Answer 2

Whenever an object hits something else, it is going to impart some energy from the impact, but the scenes they show in the movies are very exagerated. My brother has a kind of target where you shoot at the individual metal targets and they fall backwards and then you re-set them by shooting at another target which flips them back into position, so there certainly is some force involved but not a huge amount. A lot of the energy from when a bullet hits someone is dissapated in penetrating and disrupting the body tissue around the wound site. You could demonstrate this by throwing a stone into a pool of water as hard as possible; notice the splash crater will be much bigger than the diameter of the stone. PS I hope you live in a neighborhood where you don't have to see a lot of people get shot!

Answer 3

The old saying is that if a US fifty caliber machine gun round were to hit you in the earlobe, it would knock you down.
The whole idea for as bullet is to provide enough energy to puncture the target and also to provide force to damage the target.
Consider that some bullets travel at 1000 ft per second... if a bullet weighs 2 ounces, in order to stop that bullet requires about 125 lbs of force (I am simplifying this, and there are simple calculations related to the distance or moment of time required to slow the bullet to a stop.
Now, imagine if you were to get struck by a 125 pound sack of grain traveling at about a foot per second.
Your position in the universe would change.
A musket ball from an American Civil War vintage black-powder rifle might weight 3 to 5 ounces. Though it rolls out of the barrel at about 600 feet per second, its slow velocity permitted the bullet's force to be completely consumed within the body of a human. Unless the bullet were to travel through the body, the victims were knocked back.
Lastly, there is no doubt that when the classic western gunfighters squared off, the first person of the two to be hit by a bullet would usually survive to shoot back. In the initial volley, when the first bullet struck, it would spin the body of the recipient, ruining his aim, thus protecting the quicker on the draw.

Answer 4

Whatever Resistance your body gives to the bullet will equal the energy that is taken from the bullet. This is all from memory so it might have some small errors. A 45 military round if they hit u in the thumb would knock u down. It has as much as a small car. The energy is the velocity squared times the mass. If the bullet goes just through meet it will not slow down very much. But if it hits some bone the body will absorber all the kinetic energy.Yes the movies tries to make it worse than it would actually be.

Answer 5

Probably the term you're looking for is "conservation of momentum". If the victim is pushed back at all, it's because some momentum is transferred from the bullet to the victim . But even if the bullet transferred ALL of its momentum to the victim, it would only cause the victim to move a few _inches_ per second. Here's a page with a calculation: http://regentsprep.org/Regents/physics/phys01/miscons/default.htm