Some cultures have a practice of shooting a gun into the air as a form of celebrating something, New Year's Eve, for example.
A few years ago the Mythbusters explored a myth about whether such a falling bullet would come down with lethal velocity. Their experiment found that if a bullet is shot straight up then it would likely reach a stall speed, and the falling bullet would reach terminal velocity which might not be fatal if it struck someone.
But even the most inebriated of celebrants would not shoot a bullet straight up and risk being caught out in a bullet rain storm, lethal or not. And it's reasonable to believe that any celebrant with a minimal sense of self preservation would point the gun at an angle other than 90 degrees from the ground. There's your problem, as Jamie would say.
A bullet fired at an angle won't reach stall speed but will travel a long distance at a lethal velocity. And so .22LR bullets say on the box, "Dangerous within 1.5 miles."
So what is this all about? What we have in the photo is an object that was found on my patio a few days after the new year began. It appears to be a .22 short lead bullet. That one wasn't lethal, and no property damage was detected -- not even a chip in the cement. But the landing distorted the bullet a small bit which you can see on the right side of the tip. Lethal or not, I wouldn't want to have been the thing that brought that projectile to a stop.
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