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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from how stuff works dot com where
Speaker 1: smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, where
Speaker 1: do bullets go when guns are fired straight up into
Speaker 1: the air. You may have seen television programs where people
Speaker 1: who are celebrating fire guns or pistols or machine guns
Speaker 1: straight up into the air as part of the celebration,
Speaker 1: the saying what goes up must come down as an
Speaker 1: appropriate starting point for our conversation here. If you fire
Speaker 1: a gun into the air, the bullet will travel up
Speaker 1: to a mile high, depending on the angle of the
Speaker 1: shot and the power of the gun. Once it reaches
Speaker 1: its apogee, the bullet will fall. Air resistance limits its speed,
Speaker 1: but bullets are designed to be fairly aerodynamic, so the
Speaker 1: speed is still quite lethal. If the bullet happens to
Speaker 1: hit someone in rural areas, the chance of hitting someone
Speaker 1: is pretty remote because the number of people is low,
Speaker 1: but in crowded cities the probability rises dramatically and people
Speaker 1: get killed quite often by stray bullets. Therefore, most major
Speaker 1: cities have laws in place to try to keep people
Speaker 1: from shooting guns into the air in celebration. For more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, is It How
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