Warning Shots and Missiles

The point is simple: Warning shots are not missiles.

We'll leave the discussion about whether or not one should even fire warning shots for another time (you shouldn't by the way.... ever).

A lot of the arguments about why you shouldn't is that if you fire up into the air, it will come down and kill some innocent little honor student who's personal story amounts to something that should have been featured on the cover of the next Times. And the finger of blame will be pointed straight at you for ripping that life away from the world. You start sounding like a liberal at that point when you get mired in the what if's and ignore factual input.

Here are some things to consider:

1. Bullets do not correct their trajectory in any way, shape, or form once they leave your barrel. If you listen to alarmists, that bullet fired up in the air will begin to fall back to the Earth and orient itself point first, directly at little Susie's brain with full intent to ruin her day. In what world on non-Newtonian physics are you living in? Newton's first law states: When viewed in an inertial reference frame, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force. in plain English that means that if something is moving, it will continue on it's course unless something pushes it. The only two forces acting on a bullet after leaving the barrel are wind resistance and gravity. Neither of those have any particular attraction to Susie. Bullets will travel in a ballistic trajectory governed by classical mechanics.

2. Statistically, the odds of hitting a person with a bullet fired up into the air (We must assume a non trivial angle) are very slim. Perhaps better than winning the lottery but still very low. Think about what percentage of the earth is covered by bodies. Even when you correct the impact plane to account for angle of impact, it's still not very big.

3. Velocity will be substantially limited (we'll assume a shot fired will be relatively close to normal.... say given a variation of +/-20 degrees). The entire vertical component of velocity will disappear and the return to earth will be the cause of gravity and subject to gravitational acceleration. We've all heard the story about how dropping a penny from the observation deck of the Empire State Building would get falling so fast it would kill someone if it hit them on the sidewalk. Less common is the realization that the math of that claim fails to consider two very important concepts: Terminal Velocity and Free Fall. Terminal velocity governs the maximum speed a falling object will achieve, and Free Fall speaks to the absence of orientation. Just like the penny could never travel fast enough or be oriented the correct way to put a hole in someone's skull, a free falling bullet could not kill somebody. Ruin their day, and probably give them a nasty headache? Yes. But not kill them.

So come off it. Stop being alarmist about bullets fired into the air. It's not going to kill someone. Leave that out of the discussion and instead talk about the legal, ethical, and logical arguments of warning shots. Stop using false statements to justify your position... you just end up looking like an idiot.