DODGING THE BULLETS:WITHOUT DOUBT, war correspondents are wise to wear helmets and flak jackets while sending dispatches from shell-pounded streets crackling with gunfire.
When Sky News reporter Alex Crawford rode into Tripoli this week on a rebel pick-up truck, she was no doubt worried about snipers.
But even among jubilant crowds of rebel supporters, armour is a wise precaution because of the danger posed by celebratory bullets landing on heads.
While some early studies conjectured that bullets shot upwards simply vanished into space, the threat from falling ordnance is not to be dismissed.
To explore the finer details of the rule that what goes up must come down, Benjamin Robins reported in 1761 that a largebore bullet fired upwards returned to Earth three-quarters of a mile (1.2km) away half a minute later. More precise studies followed.
In the autumn of 1910, an RL Tippins hauled a Maxim machine gun to the tidal mud of the river Stour in Suffolk, eastern England, and fired two bursts of about 30 bullets straight up into the air.
With stopwatch in hand, he timed the bullets as they fell to Earth, recording flight times of about 55 seconds. The conclusion from the experiments was that the bullets reached 2,750 metres, taking 19 seconds to rise and almost twice as long – 36 seconds – to fall.
Recalling the experiment, Tippins said: “We had no head cover, but trusted to the wind to carry them away far enough to miss us.”
But what do we know today of the risk of injury from falling bullets? Between 1985 and 1992, a group of physicians in Los Angeles studied victims of gunshot wounds and identified 118 thought to have been hit by falling bullets.
These included people struck by bullets while going about their everyday business, far away from known gunfire.
Only six of the bullets were traced by the police, to shootings that occurred up to 1.6km away.
For those hit by falling bullets, the chance of the wound being fatal was far higher than a typical shooting. The hospital put deaths from regular shootings between 2 per cent and 6 per cent, while for those struck by falling bullets the death rate was nearly a third. The reason was simple – those unlucky enough to be hit by falling shells were more likely to be struck on the head. – ( Guardianservice)