Man Shoots at Chopper During Standoff
Published : Thursday, 14 May 2009, 11:52 AM CDT
Leif Knutson
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EAST BETHEL, Minn. - An East Bethel man was arrested unharmed after an hours-long standoff Wednesday in which he fired multiple rounds from a rifle, including one at a media helicopter.


David Dean Anderson, 48, was arrested for reckless discharge of a firearm, second degree assault, possession of a short barreled shotgun, domestic assault and child endangerment.


Anoka County Sheriff’s Office Deputies were called to the scene of a domestic dispute on the 900 block of 189th Avenue Northeast at 6:18 p.m.


One resident in the home called 911 after the suspect went to the basement and fired a gun.


The man was seen walked into nearby woods as Deputies responded, refusing to surrender.


During the several-hour standoff, the suspect fired his weapon in the direction of a media helicopter.


Through efforts from several agencies from the area -- including law enforcement and fire officials -- the suspect was taken into custody by the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team.


The suspect is in custody at the Anoka County jail awaiting formal charging.

So he shot at a media chopper...presumably he missed.

I'm pretty sure Mr Gravity hasn't taken vacation in awhile, so presumably he was on duty at the time. Which makes me a bit curious....where did the round land?

It's wrong-wrong-wrong, but this is the quote that leaped to mind:

"Avoid strong drink. It can cause you to shoot at tax collectors...and miss!"
-- Robert A. Heinlein

Probably on the ground. Just like all the shotgun pellets that have ever been fired into a goose, or duck, or squirrel, or clay pigeon without having killed a person because "they hit the ground at the same speed they left the barrel".

I dunno... maybe I'm just being a little snarky.

People are injured, sometimes fatally, when bullets discharged into the air fall back down. The mortality rate among those struck by falling bullets is about 32%, compared with about 2 – 6% normally associated with gunshot wounds.[5] The higher mortality is related to the higher incidence of head wounds from falling bullets.

A study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 80% of celebratory gunfire-related injuries are to the head, feet, and shoulders.[6] In the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, about two people die and about 25 more are injured each year from celebratory gunfire on New Year's Eve, the CDC says.[3] Between the years 1985 – 1992, doctors at the King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, California treated some 118 people for random falling-bullet injuries. 38 of them died.[7] Kuwaitis celebrating in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War by firing weapons into the air caused 20 deaths from falling bullets.[7]

Firearms expert Julian Hatcher studied falling bullets and found that .30 caliber rounds reach terminal velocities of 300 feet per second (90 m/s) and larger .50 caliber bullets have a terminal velocity of 500 feet per second (150 m/s).[8] A bullet traveling at only 150 feet per second (46 m/s) to 170 feet per second (52 m/s) can penetrate human skin,[9] and at less than 200 feet per second (60 m/s), it can penetrate the skull.[10] A bullet that does not penetrate the skull may still result in an intracranial injury.[11]

# December 31, 1994: A tourist from Boston was killed by a falling bullet from celebratory firing while walking on the Moonwalk in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. The Police Department there has been striving to educate the public of the danger since then, frequently making arrests for firing into the air.[18]
# July 22, 2003 more than 20 people were reported killed in Iraq from celebratory gunfire following the death of Sadam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay in 2003.[16]
# December 31, 2004: A 75-year-old man in Orlando, Florida was mortally wounded in the heart from a falling bullet just before midnight. Police later traced a gun confiscated from a man firing into the air more than a mile away to the fatal bullet. The shooter was charged with manslaughter.[19]
# January 1, 2005: A stray bullet hit a young girl during New Year celebrations in the central square of downtown Skopje, Macedonia. She died two days later. This incident led to the 2006 IANSA awareness campaign in that country.[1]
# December 28, 2005: A 23-year-old U.S. Army Private on leave after basic training fired a 9 mm pistol into the air in celebration with friends, according to police, and one of the bullets came through a fifth floor apartment window in the New York City borough of Queens, striking a 28-year-old mother of two in the eye. Her husband found her lifeless body moments later. The shooter had been drinking the night before, and turned himself in to police the next morning when he heard the news. He was charged with second-degree manslaughter and weapons related crimes,[20][21] and was later found guilty and sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison.[22]
# February 25, 2007: Five people were killed by stray bullets fired at a kite festival in Lahore, Pakistan, including a 6-year-old schoolboy who was struck in the head near his home in the city's Mazang area.[23]
# July 29, 2007: At least four people were reported killed, and 17 others wounded from celebratory gunfire in the capital city of Baghdad, Iraq following the victory of the national football team in the AFC Asian Cup,[24][25] Celebratory gunfire occurred despite warnings issued by Iraqi security forces and the country's leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who forbade the gunfire with a religious fatwā.[26]

Sure, because tiny shot pellets in a cornfield or lake are the same as rifle bullets in a city.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrator ... t_injuries



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrator ... _incidents

I'm one who will rarely say this, but I need to see a little harder science than what can be found in wikipedia.

Show me an actual controlled experiement. Difficult and expensive to set up, I know, but I have a hard time being convinced by anecdotal evidence and potentially photoshopped pictures the same way I have a hard time being convinced by stories of ghosts, the invisible sky-dude some people seem to think formed the universe in six days, or the whack jobs who say it's a miracle when something vaugely resmbling jesus or Elvis appears in a fajita in Juarez.

Show me the actual science. Crunch the numbers. There are way too many instances of misinformation, or instances of people firing not "into the air" but at angles right around 45 degrees or less from a horizontal plane. Also, there's never been one single article in a newspaper written with an intentional anti-gun slant... that would never happen.

Anyway, such an argument is not germane to this discussion, and it serves no further purpose because neither camp is gonna convince the other side that they're in error. I apologize for my thread drift and I'll leave this thread.

Episode 50 – "Bullets Fired Up"

* Original airdate: April 19, 2006

Bullets Fired Up
Myth statement Status Notes
Bullets fired into the air maintain their lethal capability when they eventually fall back down. Busted , Plausible, and Confirmed In the case of a bullet fired at sufficiently close to a vertical angle to result in a non-ballistic trajectory, the bullet would tumble, lose its spin, and fall at a much slower speed due to terminal velocity and is therefore rendered less than lethal on impact (the Busted rating). However, if a bullet is fired at a lower angle allowing for a ballistic trajectory (a far more likely case), it will maintain its spin and will retain enough energy to be lethal on impact (the Plausible rating). Because of this potentiality, firing a gun into the air is illegal in most U.S. states, and even in the states where it is legal, it is not recommended by the police. Also the MythBusters were able to identify two people who had been injured by falling bullets (fired from approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) away, and hence at a lower angle), one of them fatally (the Confirmed rating). To date, this is the only myth to receive all three ratings at the same time.

...I need to see a little harder science than what can be found in wikipedia.

For further insight, we turn to Hatcher's Notebook (1962) by Major General Julian S. Hatcher, a U.S. Army ordnance expert. Hatcher described military tests with, among other things, a .30 caliber bullet weighing .021 pounds. Using a special rig, the testers shot the bullet straight into the air. It came down bottom (not point) first at what was later computed to be about 300 feet per second. "With the [.021 pound] bullet, this corresponds to an energy of 30 foot pounds," Hatcher wrote. "Previously, the army had decided that on the average an energy of 60 foot pounds is required to produce a disabling wound. Thus, service bullets returning from extreme heights cannot be considered lethal by this standard."

<...>

Still, the question isn't how many people get injured or killed by falling bullets, it's whether such things are possible at all. On further investigation, it appears the 60 foot-pound injury threshold cited by Hatcher may be misleading — a falling bullet's kinetic energy (foot pounds) alone isn't a good predictor of the speed it needs to inflict a wound. B. N. Mattoo (Journal of Forensic Sciences, 1984) has proposed an equation relating mass and bullet diameter that seems to do a better job. Experiments on cadavers and such have shown, for example, that a .38 caliber revolver bullet will perforate the skin and lodge in the underlying tissue at 191 feet per second and that triple-ought buckshot will do so at 213 feet per second.

Mattoo's equation predicts that Hatcher's .30 caliber bullet, which has a small diameter in relation to its weight, will perforate the skin at only 124 feet per second. It's easy to believe such a bullet falling at 300 feet per second could kill you, especially if it struck you in the head. In fact, maybe I need to rethink my dismissive comments about the danger of throwing a penny off the Empire State Building, although I still think the penny's tumbling in the updrafts would render it harmless.