Thread: Surprise on the roof

From todays inspection in Oak Cliff.

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A little larger

Seeing as how you pulled it out of the roof, you just caused the leak.

It's OK, I put it back so the hole would be eaiser to spot.

Actually Jim, those are quite common to find over there in the hood.

Originally Posted by Rick Hurst

Actually Jim, those are quite common to find over there in the hood.

And all over South Florida.

Seems that people who shoot guns into the air do not consider that the bullet simply MUST come back down, several (many) deaths are caused by that each year down there.

If that shell had come down and hit you on the head, I'd bet you be dead for sure. I heard of such deaths occuring on New Years Eve. Hispanics are well known to shoot weapons up in the air to celebrate the New Year. It is quite common in this area to hear gunfire at midnight eve every year. It used to be single gun shots, not it sounds like automatic spraying shells into the sky.

Police avoid the areas like the plague on those nights.

myth busters did a tv episode on this. Fairly scientific. Outcome was that could not kill, but then again, it was the desert for recording depth of bullet.

Rick, have not seen too many shots into the air in San Antonio or El Paso, more at individuals

Steve

Originally Posted by Stephen Meyer

myth busters did a tv episode on this. Fairly scientific. Outcome was that could not kill, but then again, it was the desert for recording depth of bullet.

Rick, have not seen too many shots into the air in San Antonio or El Paso, more at individuals

Steve

All I can tell you is that people die from it every year in South Florida, as Rick said, the Hispanic areas ... which is most of South Florida now. Not all Hispanics do that, but a large enough number do that they are connected together.

JL: Why would it be a surprise. It is, after all, Oak Cliff . . .

Arizona has a law on the books called Shannon's law as she was a teenager killed by a shot fired into the air on I think New Years.

We now have the shot detecting acoustic sensors scattered around
so they can pinpoint where the shot came from.

Originally Posted by J Moore

Arizona has a law on the books called Shannon's law as she was a teenager killed by a shot fired into the air on I think New Years.

VERY smart.

We now have the shot detecting acoustic sensors scattered around so they can pinpoint where the shot came from.

In South Florida they would light up like the 4th of July, have your own Christmas tree of lights at all holidays. Between the holidays, drive by shootings, gang related shootings, and other everyday shootings of just regular people killing other regular people, not sure those would ever go silent or be able to pin point anything.

I did a strip job on a house next to West Piont a few years back and found years worth of ammo in the roof and was told its not very uncommon in the area...

Originally Posted by Mark Aakjar

I did a strip job on a house ...

How many in the audience?

Originally Posted by Stephen Meyer

myth busters did a tv episode on this. Fairly scientific. Outcome was that could not kill, but then again, it was the desert for recording depth of bullet.

You're misremembering that episode. They had several problems with the testing setup. First they fired into ballistic gel and found that a 9mm round traveled farther than one fired from a 30-06. Then they rigged up a firing mechanism to fire at true vertical and found a 9mm round (which had fallen on it's side) but the 30-06 rounds fell too far away to be found. Finally they dropped bullets from a 400ft platform and determined them to be non-lethal.

However... from 400ft a bullet will not reach its terminal velocity. Depending on the size and shape of the bullet that would be from anywhere between 1000 and 2500 ft.

Even then, there are even more variables to consider. Wind speed will affect both the falling bullet's trajectory as well as its stabilization. A 30-06 round can travel up to 10,000 ft in the air before falling. A cross-wind or simple turbulence can induce yaw into the bullet, causing it to tumble out of the sky.

None of which really matter though because typically bullets aren't fired straight up into the air, they're fired at an angle. Fired at an angle, a bullet will maintain its spin and ballistic trajectory. Whereas a bullet fired straight into the air will have an initial falling velocity of 0m/s, one fired at an angle may have a much higher velocity depending on the round and power of the weapon.

In the end, the mythbusters talked to a local ballistics expert who recounted two verified cases where people were struck by falling bullets. In one case a woman was "shot" in the leg and they traced the round back to it's owner. In another, a man was sitting in his carport when a round came through the thin roof and struck him in the head. He died later at the hospital.

Just Friday I was walking down 26th St in NYC when a round of toys came falling from a 16th floor apartment. The inflatable baseball bat wasn't nearly as frightening as some battery-powered thing that went whizzing past my head. I figure those two plastic-encased C cells could probably do more damage than a falling penny from the Empire State building.

I saw the Mythbusters episode also. What I remember was that the slugs tumble as they come down after their energy is spent. The force that they hit with isn't always that great. That said, I was in New Orleans one year, and a tourist was killed by a falling slug. Hit her just behind the ear; presumably the skull is thinner there. Her companions saw and heard nothing, she just fell over. The cops didn't notice the wound -- the coroner found it. Obviously, under the right circumstances, a falling slug can be deadly.
In the 10 years that I've been at this, I've found 5 slugs in roofs. Some were in houses way out in the sticks, but the others were in neighborhoods that weren't so great. Two were obviously .22 caliber. The others I'm not sure of since I don't know much about larger caliber stuff. Interestingly, none of these penetrated the plywood or OSB roof deck. In fact, I only had to use my fingers to remove them. The "bounce" of the roof may have absorbed some of the force when they hit. The roof where I found one of the .22's had a dent in it about 15 feet away, the same size that the slug left which I removed from the roof. I assume that one bounced off the roof -- it wasn't in the gutter.