Answer: The Lethality of Falling Bullets

Mythbusters is a television show on the U.S.-based Discovery Channel cable network focused on tackling common (and not so common) myths to see if they hold up under theatrically staged but scientifically based testing. Can a malfunctioning water heater blow the roof right off your house? Will a lightning strike to your home while you’re showering kill you? Will Coca-Cola clean corrosion off battery terminals? After conducting these kinds of tests, the Mythbusters crew gives the claim a rating of busted, plausible, or confirmed based on their findings indicating that it wouldn’t happen, it could happen, or it definitely did happen.

Very rarely a myth gets two of the three ratings and once, and only once, a tested myth received a simultaneous busted, plausible, and confirmed rating. When the crew tested the lethality of falling bullets (i.e. would a bullet fired into the air return to earth with enough force to kill someone), they found a number of compounding variables that led to the triple-rating. Bullets fired perfectly straight up would eventually lose momentum and then begin to tumble end-over-end back to earth (with enough energy to really smart if it hit you but not enough energy to kill you), thus the busted rating. Bullets fired at an angle, however, maintained their spin and angular momentum and the end of their very long arc could find the bullet with enough energy to penetrate a body, thus the plausible rating. Finally, and most morbidly, ample real world evidence of bullets fired at a distance but killing people far away (especially around holidays when people foolishly fire guns into the air in celebration) tacked on the confirmed rating.