Timo can propably give a more complete answer, but I suspect it's due to...Well, I'm not sure of the proper name for it, but it's usually called temporary cavitation - not related to the kind you see in liquid, though, I'm pretty sure.
Even if it's not slowing down much, you're still dumping a fuckload of energy into the target. When bullets hit things - despite the pointy nose - they don't really cut or pierce so much as smash their way through things. It's doing so with such energy that (in soft stuff) it creates a large cavity behind it, much larger than the bullet itself - kind of like the wake of a boat. I figure that expansion is just a stronger force than the rind can contain, and thus, poof, watermelon clouds.
To help illustrate my extremely poorly explained point and also because it looks cool, here's a slow motion video of a .308 hitting ballistics gel. You can see it expand and then start contracting back inward, and I figure that the watermelon rind isn't strong enough or elastic enough to withstand it.
Shockwaves, yo. At a guess, it probably depends on the cross-sectional area of your projectile. To get through unscathed, you're probably looking at something like scattering cross-section or optical depth, but that's generally for atomic nuclei and photons and such.
Why is it mostly schools? Shoot someplace else. Like a Wal-mart or something.
The pattern for non-urban-poor school shootings seems to be a specific combination of being bullied and being crazy. Seems to play out as a sort of "revenge," personally motivated and tied to that environment and those people.
Why is it mostly schools? Shoot someplace else. Like a Wal-mart or something.
Given how many guns are sold there and how many gun nuts shop at Wal-mart, Wal-mart is the last place you'd want to shoot up if you want to do tons of damage on your own. Less than a minute after some psycho starts shooting up a Wal-mart, the glass starts breaking in the display cases of the sporting goods department and a rudimentary armed posse will be hunting said psycho down. Granted, said posse is also likely to shoot a bunch of bystanders in the process (which is why arming non-specially trained staff at schools isn't such a good idea), but it does make it less attractive for someone who wants to single-handedly cause massive amounts of mayhem with firearms.
I think it's mainly schools because the kids with problems tend to blame the school and the older people are too lazy to find another "government" building to gun for.
Shockwaves, yo. At a guess, it probably depends on the cross-sectional area of your projectile. To get through unscathed, you're probably looking at something like scattering cross-section or optical depth, but that's generally for atomic nuclei and photons and such.
THANK YOU. Why in the hell couldn't I think of that word last night.
Watermelon is also good because it feels like you've shot someone in the head. The catharsis of this is likely most satisfying at a subconscious level.
A bullet is a relatively small piece of metal flying really really fast. What is the physics reason the watermelon explodes? Why doesn't the bullet just make a tiny hole straight through the watermelon without damaging the rest of it? If it was a needle fired from a gauss cannon, it would probably go straight through. How small and pointy does the projectile have to be to make a hole rather than an explosion?
Hydrostatic shock. Its also why the actual wound channel is the least of a gunshot victim's concerns.
Mass shooting deaths represent 0.4% of all homicides, which represent 0.6% of all deaths from any cause in the US (based on 2010 statistics). This isn't to say it's not a tragedy when it happens, but appeals to emotion shouldn't drive a debate.
Guns, as a tool, sure make killing easier. Maybe we should examine why these kids want to kill so bad, though.
One of the first things to come out of this story was parents saying "the school didn't have buzzed entry and a camera", because to combat the threat of the hundredths-of-a-percent-chance that your kid will be shot at school, you need to lock it down like a prison campus and treat everyone as a suspect.
Given the behavior of our government over the last, I dunno, 3 or 4 decades, I'm not sure I want them in charge of disarming a populace. It's always amazing to me to watch people who profess little or no faith in the US federal government otherwise do a complete 180 when it comes to letting them take away all the scary guns.
In NYC? You probably don't need a gun, or wouldn't if the NYPD wasn't corrupt as shit. In a rural area where a bear might eat your dog? You have a gun because you also own a lawnmower, it's just a tool.
A tool for killing people instead of cutting grass? Need!
Well, it's a tool for killing bears, not necessarily people (though it obviously can be used for killing people too).
The problem is that any tool that's good at killing random living things (bears, ducks, deer, zombies, etc.) is also by it's nature pretty damned good at killing people too. Admittedly, if you live in a major metropolitan area, you don't need to worry about killing bears in self-defense. However, if you live in the boonies, then you may have to and also have to deal with the fact that the same tool you use to protect yourself from bears can also kill people.
Besides the fact that I personally I think a bear's life is more important than a dog's life in pretty much every single instance...
Why even bring this up? If you live in a place where there is a non-insignificant chance you are going to have to kill a bear, why is this tool even considered in the same argument? If in NYC you don't need a gun for reasons of killing a human, in NYC and almost EVERYWHERE ELSE you don't need a gun for the purposes of killing a bear. Unless you are camping with food next to you unwrapped in a national park, you don't need a gun to kill bears. It's just not a tool you need. Never. Just pack your food away properly.
I live in rural CT and a few years ago a rabidd fox bit two people less than a mile from my house. The second guy killed the fox (don't recall what he used).
Bears? You don't shoot bears unless you know how to kill them. Odds are a non-hunter will only succeed in pissing off the bear. My dad killed a bear during deer hunting season one year. I forget the exact details of the story but it was a situation that he could not escape from and it involved many bullets from his sidearm. All the bullets were hits (I think it was a .357 mag) but bears are tough.
Besides the fact that I personally I think a bear's life is more important than a dog's life in pretty much every single instance...
Why even bring this up? If you live in a place where there is a non-insignificant chance you are going to have to kill a bear, why is this tool even considered in the same argument? If in NYC you don't need a gun for reasons of killing a human, in NYC and almost EVERYWHERE ELSE you don't need a gun for the purposes of killing a bear. Unless you are camping with food next to you unwrapped in a national park, you don't need a gun to kill bears. It's just not a tool you need. Never. Just pack your food away properly.
Bears may not have been the best example, but it was the one given. Replace "bears" with "rabid animals," as Steve suggested, or pick any other dangerous/aggressive animal where you may need to defend yourself. In general, you're right in that if you pack your food properly the odds of you being attacked by a bear is very slim.
You see, any time gun advocates propose a HYPOTHETICAL situation, one that just doesn't exist, it undermines your cause. You put so little care into even thinking up a time when having a gun is a good idea. I did a simple search and wikipedia tells me that in the last 5 years, a total of 9 people have been killed by bears in the wild. 9. In 5 years. It is such a pathetically low number, even bringing it up in a gun control thread for any reason is fucking insane.
And rabies?
"4 human cases were reported in 1997 (Montana, Washington, Texas and New Jersey) and just 1 case in 1998 (Virginia). No human deaths were recorded in the USA for 1999 but in 2000 there were 5, reported from California, New York, Georgia, Minnesota and Wisconsin plus 1 from Quebec (Canada)7. The case reported from New York was in a patient who had come from Ghana after being bitten by a dog; all the others were thought to be associated with bats."
So you should have a gun to... what? Shoot a BAT? A fucking bat???? REALLY???
Every now and then I find an old article about him but most search results I find now have paywalls in front of them. Suffice to say in the 70's my dad was the Larry Bird of the competitive police pistol shooting circuit. When some departments were bending the rules (you had to use your issued sidearm) by issuing tricked out pistols to their officers who competed he could still kick everyone's ass with a standard issue police revolver. So when he shot the bear he knew where to shoot, how to shoot and he did not miss.
Even though he carried his sidearm at all times he only used it a few times in the line of duty and never while off duty except for practice and competition.
There were so many trophies in the house that when my brothers joined boy scouts my dad would routinely remove the pistol guy from the top and put some boy scout themed figure on top so they could be given away at award ceremonies. Come to think of it I think he gave many away to whatever local group wanted trophies. So where we lived there were a lot of former pistol trophies with bowlers and pinewood derby toppers on them.
You see, any time gun advocates propose a HYPOTHETICAL situation, one that just doesn't exist, it undermines your cause.
I'm not even a hard core gun advocate... and I agree with you that the times in which you'd absolutely need a gun to defend yourself from wild critters, rabid or not, are extremely rare for the vast majority of people. Even in the cases when you may need to defend yourself from wild critters, odds are you already have a gun for another purpose.
You've already stated you're fine with gun ownership for sports such as hunting and target shooting (unless my memory completely fails me). Someone who hunts a lot is probably significantly more likely to need to defend him/herself from a wild critter of some sort than someone who basically stays at home all the time, even if they live in a very rural area. Most wild critters, especially the ones that are most likely to be dangerous, generally prefer to avoid human contact, even in rural areas. You're most likely to encounter them when you enter their domain while hunting, camping, fishing, etc. You've already stated, and rightly so, that you probably don't need to worry about bears if you keep your food properly secured. However, hunting does complicate things a bit (though the odds probably are still pretty slim). You could have just shot a deer, but the carcass was noticed by some sort of wild predator that thinks it would make an easy meal, for example. Or perhaps you're hunting some sort of dangerous pack/herd animal. Shooting one member of the pack/herd may result in other members attacking you to defend themselves. That sort of thing.
Again, those scenarios are almost certainly very rare, but they are a justifiable use of a firearm. Granted, in this case, the "tool" isn't meant to be used for "defense," but is still meant to be used for killing and in a manner where you have already declared it's okay to use it for killing, as long as it's killing for a certain purpose.
Yes, I understand all this. My question is still: "Why even bring this up?"
If you are going into wild areas to hunt, you should have the tools for the job. That may or may not include a gun that can kill an attacking bear. Great.
How has this anything to do with anything except make the "People outside of NYC might need a gun at home" point waaaaaaaaay more stupid sounding than it really is?
They are very rare. In over 50 years of hunting (multiple seasons per year) there was only ever one "bear incident" in my family that resulted in having to kill the offending animal. There have been multiple incidents that were able to be averted either by waiting or scaring off the offending animal.
However, we as a nation, tend to legislate not on the odds of something occurring but the lethality of an event if it were to occur.
Take mass shooting at schools. These events are insanely rare but when they happen they tend to be very lethal and scary. This causes schools to ramp up their security to deal with an event that is statistically unlikely to ever happen. Same with wild animal attacks in rural areas (not counting hunters who are entering dangerous animal territory.) Even though the odds of a wild animal attack are extremely low people like to know that they have lethal options available to them.
Obviously every incident has exceptions. Hiking in an area where mountain lions have recently moved into or attending an inner city school in a bad neighborhood will increase the odds of some version of the bad thing happening.
Once you have a coherent point, and aren't pulling shit out your ass, I'd be happy to argue. Meanwhile you can stop spouting utter shit and we'll all be better off.
To answer Steve's new point, I see the analogy between bear attacks and school attacks. There might be ways we can compare them to learn lessons for future prevention of or preparation for school shootings. The cool thing about being in a National Park (from my experience of a single visit) is that there are "Be Bear Aware" signs and information everywhere. And there are rangers making sure everyone knows what's up. As the right to bear claws isn't a political issue for the bears, there isn't anything standing in the way of sensible action and education.
Comments
Even if it's not slowing down much, you're still dumping a fuckload of energy into the target. When bullets hit things - despite the pointy nose - they don't really cut or pierce so much as smash their way through things. It's doing so with such energy that (in soft stuff) it creates a large cavity behind it, much larger than the bullet itself - kind of like the wake of a boat. I figure that expansion is just a stronger force than the rind can contain, and thus, poof, watermelon clouds.
To help illustrate my extremely poorly explained point and also because it looks cool, here's a slow motion video of a .308 hitting ballistics gel. You can see it expand and then start contracting back inward, and I figure that the watermelon rind isn't strong enough or elastic enough to withstand it.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/10/reynolds-high-school-shooting-portland/10279083/
No, not that other one:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/06/justice/seattle-campus-shooting/
No, not that attack on police officers. Or the other two that happened in the last weeks.
This is a brand new one.
The catharsis of this is likely most satisfying at a subconscious level.
Guns, as a tool, sure make killing easier. Maybe we should examine why these kids want to kill so bad, though.
One of the first things to come out of this story was parents saying "the school didn't have buzzed entry and a camera", because to combat the threat of the hundredths-of-a-percent-chance that your kid will be shot at school, you need to lock it down like a prison campus and treat everyone as a suspect.
Given the behavior of our government over the last, I dunno, 3 or 4 decades, I'm not sure I want them in charge of disarming a populace. It's always amazing to me to watch people who profess little or no faith in the US federal government otherwise do a complete 180 when it comes to letting them take away all the scary guns.
In NYC? You probably don't need a gun, or wouldn't if the NYPD wasn't corrupt as shit. In a rural area where a bear might eat your dog? You have a gun because you also own a lawnmower, it's just a tool.
The problem is that any tool that's good at killing random living things (bears, ducks, deer, zombies, etc.) is also by it's nature pretty damned good at killing people too. Admittedly, if you live in a major metropolitan area, you don't need to worry about killing bears in self-defense. However, if you live in the boonies, then you may have to and also have to deal with the fact that the same tool you use to protect yourself from bears can also kill people.
Why even bring this up? If you live in a place where there is a non-insignificant chance you are going to have to kill a bear, why is this tool even considered in the same argument? If in NYC you don't need a gun for reasons of killing a human, in NYC and almost EVERYWHERE ELSE you don't need a gun for the purposes of killing a bear. Unless you are camping with food next to you unwrapped in a national park, you don't need a gun to kill bears. It's just not a tool you need. Never. Just pack your food away properly.
I live in rural CT and a few years ago a rabidd fox bit two people less than a mile from my house. The second guy killed the fox (don't recall what he used).
Bears? You don't shoot bears unless you know how to kill them. Odds are a non-hunter will only succeed in pissing off the bear. My dad killed a bear during deer hunting season one year. I forget the exact details of the story but it was a situation that he could not escape from and it involved many bullets from his sidearm. All the bullets were hits (I think it was a .357 mag) but bears are tough.
Yeah, don't shoot bears.
Though, I will say, bears aren't the only animals who can take a bullet surprisingly in stride.
And rabies?
"4 human cases were reported in 1997 (Montana, Washington, Texas and New Jersey) and just 1 case in 1998 (Virginia). No human deaths were recorded in the USA for 1999 but in 2000 there were 5, reported from California, New York, Georgia, Minnesota and Wisconsin plus 1 from Quebec (Canada)7. The case reported from New York was in a patient who had come from Ghana after being bitten by a dog; all the others were thought to be associated with bats."
So you should have a gun to... what? Shoot a BAT? A fucking bat???? REALLY???
Get out.
He killed it with a blunt instrument, one street over from me.
Every now and then I find an old article about him but most search results I find now have paywalls in front of them. Suffice to say in the 70's my dad was the Larry Bird of the competitive police pistol shooting circuit. When some departments were bending the rules (you had to use your issued sidearm) by issuing tricked out pistols to their officers who competed he could still kick everyone's ass with a standard issue police revolver. So when he shot the bear he knew where to shoot, how to shoot and he did not miss.
Even though he carried his sidearm at all times he only used it a few times in the line of duty and never while off duty except for practice and competition.
There were so many trophies in the house that when my brothers joined boy scouts my dad would routinely remove the pistol guy from the top and put some boy scout themed figure on top so they could be given away at award ceremonies. Come to think of it I think he gave many away to whatever local group wanted trophies. So where we lived there were a lot of former pistol trophies with bowlers and pinewood derby toppers on them.
Back to subject at hand: http://www.npr.org/2014/06/10/320575201/second-amendment-s-only-sentence-generates-recurrent-debate
Good points in that article about the shifting purpose behind the second amendment and how its interpretation has changed over the years.
You've already stated you're fine with gun ownership for sports such as hunting and target shooting (unless my memory completely fails me). Someone who hunts a lot is probably significantly more likely to need to defend him/herself from a wild critter of some sort than someone who basically stays at home all the time, even if they live in a very rural area. Most wild critters, especially the ones that are most likely to be dangerous, generally prefer to avoid human contact, even in rural areas. You're most likely to encounter them when you enter their domain while hunting, camping, fishing, etc. You've already stated, and rightly so, that you probably don't need to worry about bears if you keep your food properly secured. However, hunting does complicate things a bit (though the odds probably are still pretty slim). You could have just shot a deer, but the carcass was noticed by some sort of wild predator that thinks it would make an easy meal, for example. Or perhaps you're hunting some sort of dangerous pack/herd animal. Shooting one member of the pack/herd may result in other members attacking you to defend themselves. That sort of thing.
Again, those scenarios are almost certainly very rare, but they are a justifiable use of a firearm. Granted, in this case, the "tool" isn't meant to be used for "defense," but is still meant to be used for killing and in a manner where you have already declared it's okay to use it for killing, as long as it's killing for a certain purpose.
If you are going into wild areas to hunt, you should have the tools for the job. That may or may not include a gun that can kill an attacking bear. Great.
How has this anything to do with anything except make the "People outside of NYC might need a gun at home" point waaaaaaaaay more stupid sounding than it really is?
However, we as a nation, tend to legislate not on the odds of something occurring but the lethality of an event if it were to occur.
Take mass shooting at schools. These events are insanely rare but when they happen they tend to be very lethal and scary. This causes schools to ramp up their security to deal with an event that is statistically unlikely to ever happen. Same with wild animal attacks in rural areas (not counting hunters who are entering dangerous animal territory.) Even though the odds of a wild animal attack are extremely low people like to know that they have lethal options available to them.
Obviously every incident has exceptions. Hiking in an area where mountain lions have recently moved into or attending an inner city school in a bad neighborhood will increase the odds of some version of the bad thing happening.