OK, fine, if it is an urban myth that people have been injured and killed by such bullets fired into the air then how does one explain my friend Gary's mom being killed by just such a stray bullet?
She was laying in the bed of a camper shell above the cab of their truck at a state park campground in northern California when a rifle bullet passed into the camper shell and killed her. Trees solid all around the campspace but with a spot open to the sky just around the parking spot. Angle of entry (as best the park cops could tell, lining up the hole in the camper with the place she was struck) indicated someone had shot their rifle some distance away such that the bullet arced up above the trees and then came back down below the treetops to strike her. The bullet was moving slow enough after it penetrated the camper shell (thin aluminum over thin particle board or paneling) that when it hit her it did not kill her outright with hemolytic shock; instead, it ripped an artery open and she, terrified, bled to death before their eyes despite desperate efforts to reach a hospital.
Physics and science --at least of the sort I am fairly familiar with-- suggest whenever theory does not match up with actual results from the natural experiment being performed in fact, then probably there is some variation or aspect of the theory which has not been completely understood (or, sometimes, is just outright incorrect). Empirical field results trump armchair theory. Gary's mom was a real nice gal; there was no other rational explanation for what happened to her, so it is going to be difficult for me to accept that bullets shot haphazardly into the air do not present a hazard.
Myself, I will be taking a very dim view of it if anyone is shooting weapons into the night near my place.
Aloha.
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Vienna Teng in Düsseldorf, "Soon love soon."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8-mIouMbqM
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