Originally Posted By: hm1996Originally Posted By: Ernest III do not reccomend shooting up unless out in the wilderness or have a back stop. Im talking about rimfires here. That being said I have a dumb question or maybe 3 or 4.LOL If a 17 gr hmr bullet is fire up at say a squirrel and misses when the bullet returns to earth would it have enough force to wound or even kill a person?I would not think so because it would be falling as if it were just dropped not fired at 2600 FPS. Am I wrong in thinking this.Forgive me but the older I get the more about physics I forget. Can someone elaborate? And does the bullet pick up speed while falling or not? Again I would not think so.
Daryl P.
Sounds as if you are speaking of firing straight up. Have always heard that a bullet fired straigt up will return to earth at the same velocity as it was fired. Not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination (so don't ask me to explain the formula 
) but this seems to support that theory:
Quote: Along y
The bullet leaves the gun with a high velocity. The entire kinetic energy of the y-component is converted to potential energy at the top (where velocity in y-direction=0). On its way down, the potential energy is converted back to the exact same kinetic energy, giving the bullet a velocity equal in magnitude to the initial velocity, but in the opposite direction.
http://www.quora.com/Physics/When-a-gun-...comes-back-down
Obviously not a good idea to discharge a rifle/pistol into the air.
Regards,
hm 
I'm glad these folks from quora physics weren't in charge of building our nuclear weapons in WW2. The answer is aprox. 90 m/sec. Second paragraph in the examples section. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity I don't think it would feel very good to get whacked in the head by one at about 290 fps.
