One of the four rules of gun safety: know your target and what’s beyond it. While this video shows a wedding celebrant shooting a member of the party in the head, it’s also true that all the rounds he fired skywards will eventually land somewhere with lethal force – should someone be unlucky enough to be underneath. That is all.

66 COMMENTS

      • I’d like to own a select fire, not live in a sh– hole.

        Washington State is one of the states that outlaws select fire. So even with butt loads of money, I can’t have one. Heck, we couldn’t even have a SBR until recently.

        Was my point that elusive?

  1. Mythbusters did that segment already, there has to be an angle to co tinue the bullets velocity and add to it the force of Gravity. The 90 degree doesn’t pick up enough terminal velocity. But I will not be trying this anytime soon.

    • OMG, watching the video later it looks like the barrel was pointing right at the back of that dudes head….wtf! Even if he had not shot him, he would have made him deaf!

    • Even if it is fired at a trajectory that should theoretically allow it to nose over and come back to earth point first, you still have to account for bullet stability. Think about it, if you spin a top; as time goes on it begins to teeter and wobble and then fall, so do really long pointy rifle bullets especially when they transition from supersonic to subsonic velocities. Additionally the gyros coping stability of a spinning bullet will cause it to resist nosing over at a sharp angle, so if you shoot it up at a fairly steep angle, the nose of the bullet will want to continue to rise as the bullet reaches the top of its trajectory and begins to fall to earth and so it will begin to tumble. Once a bullet begins to tumble it will naturally settle on falling sideways through the air where, as myth busters pointed out, terminal velocity is just about hard enough to leave a pretty good sized lump on your head, but otherwise everyone goes home at the end of the day. My semi educated wild ass guess lead me to believe it would be pretty hard to find that optimal trajectory to yield a bullet falling back to earth pointy end first in perfectly stable flight with enough velocity to kill someone, then again you only have to get lucky once.

      • Your theorizing is like the “scientifically speaking, bumblebees are unable to fly” report. We have confirmed reports of people killed by celebratory gunfire and bullets falling at a high angle, so we don’t have to prove if it’s possible. I don’t know what the wounds are like, those details aren’t in news reports, but even if it doesn’t penetrate the skull a hard knock on the head can still kill.

        • Where is the evidence you speak of that specifies ‘high-angle’ gunfire? Big difference between firing up and firing at a shallower angle.

        • Shooting mostly straight up is more likely to cause the bullet to come back closer to the terminal velocity for that object, rather than the speed of a fired bullet. I would say that at least the author should be absolutely sure about is facts before publishing. After all the closer is what goes up deadly will come down deadly

  2. Well that sucks. Died, maybe went to heaven, but not a martyr. What does he do for the rest of eternity, sit around and watch the other guys play with their 72 virgins?

  3. We know it’s beyond stupid to fire live ammunition into the air for entertainment. However, I do have a problem with the rule about never pointing your gun at something you are unwilling to destroy. As I sit at my computer, there is nothing around me, in any direction including up and down, that I would willingly shoot. What I do have is a range of choices ranging from poor to intolerable. The worst choice is in the direction of my wife who is sitting across the room from me. The least bad is down into the basement where there is some expensive equipment but no people. Perhaps, we should change the rule to read, “Always keep your weapon pointed in the safest available direction.”

    I have a similar problem with “always treat a gun as if it is loaded.” How do we square that with pulling the trigger on a Glock to field strip it? I prefer a version of the rule attributed to the late Jeff Cooper. “You may consider a gun to be unloaded only if you have verified its condition personally and kept control of it thereafter.” Of course, you should still point your unloaded Glock in the safest available direction before pulling its trigger.

    • I’ve felt the same. I always teach new shooters to not point at people they dont wanna kill, and to always know the condition of the gun. There is actually the proverbial empty gun: one that you have carefully checked and has never left your immediate attention ever since. Reholstering doesnt count. Leaving it on the table to take a dump doesnt count. If you’re pulling that trigger to disassemble or to relieve the tension on the mainspring, check the chamber immediately before you do that. Barring that, all guns are always loaded.

    • Let’s say all guns suddenly became sentient, could chamber rounds out of thin air, and could fire on their own. Is there a direction you would point the gun that would allow you to keep it in the house? That’s the something you are willing to destroy. Remember, it’s willing to, not want to.

      With always loaded, same thing. When pulling the trigger on the Glock for takedown, you don’t point the gun at your head or a person. You point it in the direction mentioned above – where if it magically conjured a chambered round after you confirmed it was clear, you would destroy something that you are willing to allow to be destroyed.

    • I hope flying brains got all over the wedding cake.That would be a real buzzkill.In this case,I think a muslim wedding would be a good place for a gun free zone depending on you’re point of view. I think they should have more guns at muslim weddings.

  4. And here they thought someone would be burying a stiffie after the wedding….
    Turns out, they were right.

  5. I would say that seeing this has upset me but I’d be lying,this guy would probably be wearing a suicide vest in a few months anyway. And what’s the deal with guys getting all involved in weddings anyway,isn’t that a woman thing? I thought guys were supposed to get drunk and stupid the night before,these guys supposedly don’t drink,it’s a good thing they don’t,they don’t seem to need alcohol to make them act exceedingly stupid.Here’s an idea,lets make guns illegal in the US so guys in the middle east don’t shoot each other at weddings.

    • Have you ever seen the average IQ’s for the middle east?

      It’s not PC to discuss, but there are substantial IQ differences between different countries and races.

      • Incest. 70% FBD(father’s brother’s daughter) weddings in Pakistan to name one, and I got that number from Wikipedia. It is surely worse, and has been happening for centuries.

  6. This isn’t the first person killed in such a manner in the Islamic world. It seems every couple of years or so, there’s a case of “happy fire” nailing someone in the head, face or guts.

    Third worlders gonna third world.

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