Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff, it's Christian Seger. What if I take this imaginary gun that's in my hand and I fired it straight up into the air? Bang bang bang? Wow? What is going to happen to all these imaginary bullets? Well, the old saying what goes up must come down is an appropriate way to start off this conversation, because that's exactly what happens to straight bullets when they're fired up in the air.
You know how crazy guns can be. If you shoot a gun up in the air, bullets are going to travel up to a mile high to bring on the angle of the shot and the power of the gun. And once it reaches a climax in the air, that bullet it's gonna fall. Now, air resistance limits its speed, but bullets are designed to be fairly aerodynamic, so the speed is still quite lethal if the bullet happens to
hit someone. Now, if you're in rural areas and you're shooting guns out in the field, the chances of hitting someone they're pretty low because the number of people are also pretty low. But if you go to a crowded city someplace like I don't know, times square and you start shooting off a gun, well, hey, you're gonna get in a lot of trouble and your chances of hitting someone is going to go up dramatically because well, the number of people around you have gone up as well.
And the fact of the matter is that people do get killed quite often by stray bullets. Therefore, most major cities have laws in place to try to keep people from shooting guns in the air in celebration. So if you want to celebrate, I don't know, think of an alternative like high fiving or eating ice cream that's a safe thing to do. You can throw your spoon up in the air and it might hit someone in the head,
but you know what, it won't kill them. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.