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Police shoot snake and kills a 5 yo boy

  • #21
500 yards...1000 yards...still not a mile :D. Do you know how many yards are in a mile even?

Your #1 depends on a lot of things. You can argue that there are some cartriges that can travel over a mile (which I've only seen you provide "stats" for the 45-70 so far), but that doesn't mean they're deadly at that range. I don't know where rifles even came into this...the cop was using a handgun, which is not going to go very far at all in comparison to rifles. I don't even know why you're bringing in examples of people that are purposely trying to hit things at great distances, when the conversation was about firing randomly into the air. Its simple: A falling bullet traveling at 9.8 m/s2 or a little greater will not kill you, unless you're an infant or over 80, or you have osteaoperosis.

Though you've got a lot more experience than me with guns, you don't have anywhere near the experience I do with physics. 9.8m/s2 is not enough, end of story.
 
  • #22
That's acceleration, not velocity. The falling bullet is accelerating at 9.8 m/s2 and a rising bullet is decelerating the same. In the absence of air resistance, a falling bullet would be lethal in not too many seconds. In the real world, we need to know what a bullet's terminal velocity is in air. I've heard a range of estimates ranging from it being too slow to be fatal to being plenty fast enough.
 
  • #23
When an object is falling acceration = velocity very quickly. That is why a bowling ball and a bullet will fall at the same rate. Once a bullet hits its Hmax, velocity/acceleration = 0, it then accelerates at 9.8m/s2 until it reaches terminal velocity. Same thing if you throw a bowling ball in the air, except that probably would kill you by breaking your neck/cracking your skull because of the mass.

In the absence of air resistance, a falling bullet would be lethal in not too many seconds
Nope. In a vacuum acceleration is 9.8m/s2, which isn't fast enough to kill. In the real world, the value is even smaller.

Square root of gt/2 :D
 
  • #24
Acceleration can never equal velocity because they have different units. Looking only at the number, v = a in ~1 sec (assuming both are expressed in distance per second). If they're written in m/hr and m/hr2, the numbers (in a vacuum) would be the same in an hour.
 
  • #25
For an object of that weight and that size its so small that it can be approximated as about the same ;). The actual value is around 8.8-10 (for a bullet), which is close to 9.8.

use Cd(rho)V^2A/2 = W
then: Vterminal = sqrt(2W/Cd(rho)A)

It depends on the mass of the bullet, usually around 0.02-0.04 kg, blah blah blah. If anyone is curious do the math (I'm not doing it for you), and you will see that normal rounds will not kill you by falling. Although lots of people think so, dropping a penny off of the empire state building won't kill you either.
 
  • #26
What would have happened if the boy was fishing, got bit by the snake, and died? (assuming the snake was poisonous) Would everyone still say "AHHH, poor snake." Would it be down with the snake instead of the cop?

[Remember we excroched on their habitat. They are not encroching on ours./QUOTE]

Actually, the snake encroched on the birds habitat (if thats the case), and the cop tried to be a hero. Let's not forget our feathered friends here. :-D No wonder Andy never wore a gun.

What is considered man's habitat now days? My house isn't my habitat anymore? The snakes have all the wild and they still need the small piece of property my creepy one bedroom apartment sits on? What happened to being on the top of the foodchain? :crazy:

[/Call in he experts to get them removed if they are in your house.QUOTE]
Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio and Steve Irwin?

If the cop was in the wrong for killing the snake, instead of catcing it and releasing it back into the wild, then every person with a mouse trap, roach motel, bug zapper, etc. are just as guilty.
 
  • #27
You have a great point. Humans sort of live everywhere, it's not like we have a set range.
 
  • #28
First I don't think the snake was venomous, so if the snake bit the boy, the boy would still be alive. Lets just say that the snake was venomous, since almost all venomous snake bites in the US are non-lethal the boy would probably still be alive. If the snake bit the boy, whose fault would it have been. Since no snake in the US bite offensively, it would have been the boys fault because the snake will always try to get away without contact with a human.

Actually, the snake encroched on the birds habitat (if thats the case)

Actually the bird was in the snakes domain, the snake did what predators do, eat.

As we build our houses farther and farther into the woods, why do we expect there not to be wildlife in our yards? The animals were here millions of years before we were. So we are building in the animals home.

You mentioned that we are at the top of the food chain. The key word here is CHAIN. It takes all the animals surviving that keeps us on top. Without the snakes, the food chain will soon be broken. That will leave us with out of controlled disease and soon starvation.
 
  • #30
phission......few examples to kinda get my point across the guys using 223 for deer at 700 yards are using bullets weighting 69 grains or about .00447 kilograms(.1577 ounces) and are reliably killing 150ish pound animals easily. give me a say a 338 Winchester Magnum(a cartridge thats 49 years old) load it with 300 grain match bullets(.685 ounces, .019 kilo's) with practice i can make life hell for a person at 1000 yards with ALOT of practice 1500 yards wouldnt be hard (1760 yards to a mile) and i dont consider myself dedicated enough to play at these ranges with experts.

it dont take much to kill a person. the bison hunters were reliably killing critters that weighted in excess of 1 ton at ranges from 100 to 1500 yards. this means the bullet had to penetrate FEET of hide, muscle and bones. a bison shot through one lung can run for miles and occasionally survive. requires both lungs to be punctured to drop them reliably. also these hunters would sit in one spot and wanted to be far enough away that the gun shot not disturb the animals. from their on spot they would drop as many as 250 animals in a day. killing a 100 some pound person at longer distances is easy........ensuring a hit is another thing entirely but a bullet having enough energy to kill is easy to accomplish at VERY long ranges
 
  • #31
Again, you're talking about bullets which still have a Vocos(theta) value, which makes things different depending on said value. When the statement was made that a falling bullet can't kill you, this is in reference to a falling bullet, i.e. one that has a 0 or negligible (arbitrarily small) value for Vocos(theta), and it's velocity/acceleration is completely dependent on the value of sqrt gt/2 and Vosin(theta). If I was better at calculus I'd be able to find out at what range a bullet become ineffective to kill someone, but uhhhh...I'm not. Math sucks.
 
  • #32
been 7 years since i last messed with calc dont ask me :grin:
 
  • #33
I have encountered rattlesnakes many times when I go hunting, walked over a couple of them without seeing them until I was practically on top of them. Of all the rattlers I have seen and had gotten close by accident. Only three rattlers have rattled there rattles, just three and none of them attempted to strike me. Half of the time they would move, the other half they would stay put where I spotted them, but I always back off.

If you guys are wondering, I never shot at any of them… Ever… They have shown respect and did like wise. I back off.

The story of this guy shooting at a bitty snake is astounding to me; this man shouldn’t be a cop. Talk about of overreacting!
 
  • #34
What about Guam ;)?


Guam, is an example of an invasive species. That is a whole different topic.

And some guys are cops because Kmart is not hiring.
 
  • #35
Hahahaha Ozzy.

This is definitely a tragedy. Accidents keep happening as of late... a bridge collapse, a mine collapse in Utah, a mine collapse in Idaho, and now a kid got shot by a moronic cop who was shooting at a snake. SERIOUSLY! The snake wouldn't slither down the tree (?) and slither over and randomly bite the people. You don't need to shoot at it, you'd probably miss anyways, it's a little snake, not everyone has to aim there guns at it shooting until they all start dropping with bullets in them because they can't hit the snake. That's probably what would have happened if the rest of them decided shooting a small snake was worth. You can hear me saying small because U.S. snakes typically are on the small side, compared to tropical snakes they're even smaller, and like someone said previously it was a large chance it was NOT venomous and if it was, not lethal. I've always been interested in Reptiles, just can't afford the huge price of them. So why do you need to pull out your handgun, the thing that police officers use before all else to serve justice to shoot a small snake in a tree or wherever it was? Yeah, this guy seriously needs to be locked up and the family to just strip that department of money until they go into debt.
 
  • #36
Things happen. Too often because of a refusal to pay the cost of doing something right.

According to more recent articles in that OK paper, the man who pulled the trigger (twice) was one month out of training and 3 of the town's 10 police officers are on leave. One is the shift supervisor who had also responded. He had 5 years of service. While that's enough experience to be supervising at McDonalds, it wouldn't cut it where I work. And we have a lot less authority and bear a lot less responsibility than a police force. If you want top quality police officers, you have to pay what it takes to get them and to get them trained. I don't know the details, but I'm guessing that town, like most others, doesn't do all that.

Mine accidents generally happen because of cutting corners. With such lax regulation, the only way to compete in the industry is to be as reckless as everyone else. If there were strict enforcement and accountability, mining coal would cost a few pennies more per ton and everyone using it would spend a trivial amount so miners don't have to die or be injured. When mine owners operate with impunity, miners die.

We still don't know what went wrong with the bridge, but we're much better at spending on new construction, which puts money in the pockets of real estate speculators and developers somewhere, than we are at spending to maintain what we already have. Here in CT, a newspaper reported that our DOT had cut back from inspecting bridges every other year as recommended by the feds to inspecting them every 4th year. The governor was embarassed enough to start hiring inspectors again to look at the worst bridges. That was even before the MN bridge failure. The governor is always the first to take credit for cutting taxes, but also the first to blame others (faceless bureaucrats at the DOT) for not having enough people to inspect bridges.
 
  • #37
Good thing it was just one snake- imagine if there'd been a swarm of "africanized bees" when the officer arrived- just switch to full auto and git blastin eh???

Seriously, shooting a wiggly snake in a tree sounds pretty dang silly to me for a LOT of reasons, glad we do things differently up here :D
 
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