Amish 15-year old girl ....

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A mile and a half? .54 roundball? The odds are better that there may be foul play ...... I'd be interested in the autopsy report.
 
jimbob86 said:
A mile and a half? .54 roundball? The odds are better that there may be foul play ...... I'd be interested in the autopsy report.
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Thats true the final report isn't out yet. The caliber the man discharged and what he had it loaded with has not been revealed either.

As I noted earlier it may well have been a sabot load with a .44, or 45 caliber pistol bullet. These can easily be launched at 2000+ fps and have much better flight characteristics and velocity retention.

Everyone seems to be thinking traditional style muzzleloader and a round ball. It could very easily, have been an in-line loaded with a sabot. Many hunters prefer them for their increased ballistic performance.
 
That seems.... improbable beyond belief. What kind of gun was he shooting and what kind of tree?

I have put THOUSANDS of rounds into trees and never seen ANY indication that any round of any type from handguns, shotguns and rifles will not penetrate any and all trees.
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I've put thousands of rounds into trees, as well. In fact, I think I went through about 6,500 rounds in a single day, in 2001; when Cornbush and I cleared 2,500 sq ft of trees, with nothing but firearms. (Oh, the good old days of true 'disposable' income. ;))

I've seen light handgun loads and many rimfire ricochets that can't penetrate the sapwood layer of Quaking Aspens. I've even seen some that bounced off the tree with enough energy to draw blood -- my blood. (If there's a ricochet, it hits me; never the shooter. :()
In addition, I've seen quite a few "low powered" cartridges that have difficulty penetrating compressed Juniper wood (bent, twisted, whatever makes the wood a little more dense -- same cartridges as above, along with .22 WMR, .17 HMR, .380 Auto).

Death by tree ricochet... I don't think so.
Injury by tree ricochet... Absolutely.
 
When I get in the woods I look around at trees and find one I plan to shoot if I don't shoot a deer.
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Hopefully you're shooting dead trees. Can't see much sense in killing beautiful living trees. Just saying...

Absolutely, positively no excuse for intentionally discharging a firearm into the air. I don't care if you're in the middle of a million acre national forest in the Colorado Rockies. You just don't do it.
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Sound wisdom, but I don't imagine there are many here who have never done so. Rare is the person who hasn't at least once shot at a dead pine branch or old pine cone. Or shot at, and missed, a squirrel up in a tree. And, I'm sure that many have fired a round straight up into the air just to see if it came back down next to them. I'm sure I must have done that as a kid. I would imagine, however, that this situation isn't a case where the hunter fired directly up into the air.

In summary, of course it was a bad idea, and it caused a freak accident. I imagine the hunter is beating himself up about it more than anyone else could possibly do.
 
A mile and a half is no problem for an aerodynamic sabot. The heavier a slug is, the more it resists the force of drag from air. The more aerodynamic a slug is, the less force drag exerts on the projectile. The closer the angle of launch to 45 degrees, the farther it will go. Simple high school physics. I see no conspiracy to make us give up our guns, drink soy lattes or drive prius's here, just some jackass that fired his gun in the air. He should have the pants sued off of him if he doesn't wind up in jail.
 
There was a story in Readers Digest, maybe forty years ago, about a detective investigating a car crash. The driver had a bullet hole in the back of the head. Ultimately, it was determined that the bullet had been fired in an urban area across a fairly large body of water (may have been San Francisco Bay area), skipped across the water, and entered the moving car via the rolled-down window of the car's rear door! You wonder how many bullets fall to earth each day, unknown because they didn't hit anything of value!
 
Negligant discharge.

A few years ago (backin lat 2006/early 2007) A few marines in the 7th regiment (I don't remember what battalion) were finishing up a training op in 29 palms. A boot on the turret swung the mk19 to the front of the humvee and then attempted to clear it. The kid in the turret in teh humvee in front of him took a cheesie poof round to the back of the head and died. If I recall corectly the punishment was fitting, being he was directly responsable for another young mans death.

A few months later a boot from 3/7 accidentially sent a cheesie poof round from his 203 into the back of his Lt. The Lt. was wearing armor so he survived, but was peeing blood for a while. I remember that one because my Lt. called the platoon togather and told us he'd do some very unpleasant things to us if we put a negligent discharge into his back.

I understand accidents, but if you think your responsable enough to hold a weapon you better be thinking about how you might accidentally kill someone every time you pull it out. Find those dangers and fix them befor they do kill somone.
 
Besides which, we're talking about shooting a tree out in the woods where you hunt, not "city trees".
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Were we?
The OP didn't specify exactly where.
"Greenies" are notorious for spiking trees in the woods to prevent them from being cut down.
I've seen "woods trees" in public hunting areas that have grwon partially around metal fence posts.

Also - I've wasted enough of my time on this as it is..
I wasn't there when the incident is supposed to have occured, so I have no idea what happened.

I have seen more than a fair amount of hard materials that trees have grown around though & as someone said, why shoot a tree in the first place?
 
Brother shot my S&W 38 J frame into a railroad tie backstop from about 5-7yds(can't remember exact dis). Projectile came straight back, hitting him square in the adams apple and landing at his feet. Biiiggg pop-knot ensued but didn't draw blood.
Culprit...piece of metal an inch or so in RR tie

I live in the middle of the woods. Thanks to a trespassing squirrel hunter, I'm a proud owner of a 22 bullet in the wooden paneled wall behind where the couch is at. Bullet came through living room window.

I don't allow squirrel hunting with a rifle here on the property.
I'm not against squirrel hunting with a rifle, just against irresponsible people that hunt squirrel or (anything else) with a rifle.

The main thing in this tragic event is the shooter could have unloaded his rifle in so many ways that is safe but choose to do it in the most unsafe manner there is. More than likely never considering the range of his weapon. Never considering, 'if it goes up, it must come down'.
Just wasn't thinking and it cost a life. Something I bet he will think about the rest of his.
 
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Those buggies are pretty much enclosed.... it would pretty near have to come through the roof to hit the girl in the head......
 
...'if it goes up, it must come down'. Just wasn't thinking and it cost a life. Something I bet he will think about the rest of his.
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Apparently the shooter was also Amish.
As close as those communities are, his own conscience & circle of familiy will never be able to get past this.

Notwithstanding all the "ain't-the-awful" comments preceding, there but for the Grace of God go many of us.


.
 
jimbob86 said:
Those buggies are pretty much enclosed.... it would pretty near have to come through the roof to hit the girl in the head......
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Some are, some not. We have a growing Amish community in our area. The buggies range from quite fancy fully enclosed units to little more than a wagon with a bench seat.
 
Gehrhard said:
Now Standing Wolf, it was negligent on his part but, comeon, what are the chances of hitting ANYTHING but a spit of dirt there? And the result was not intentional obviously. That's an accident. I'm just saying...
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The fact that the result was unintentional is what makes it negligent homicide rather than murder. The fact that the chances were small didn't help the girl, did they? In short, the guy gambled with someone else's life ... and they both lost.

This was NOT an accident. He pulled the trigger.
 
There really are only two (significant) forces acting on a bullet after leaving the muzzle: gravity and drag. You literally add the two Forces together in computing bullet state (position and velocity) at any time thereafter... even in the simplest of problem solutions.

(Honest, one of the most elemental equations-of-motion calculations done by freshman physics types is the calculation of trajectories combining gravity and drag.)

It can get a little messy because the drag coefficients change as velocity changes, but then that's why God created Excel and the IF-THEN statement ... to give even poor men access to finite-difference calculations.
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The way you can tell that a particular ballistic calculator does NOT take the terminal velocity effect into account is that if it did, at extremely extended ranges the velocity of the projectile would reach terminal velocity and wouldn't decrease further.

So go back to the ballistic calculator and give it the information for a round lead ball of 0.54 caliber and 4500 yards for the range. If the velocity decreases below about 430fps that would be proof that to get the ACTUAL total impact velocity you will need to do a vector sum of the terminal velocity and the remaining horizontal velocity (the velocity provided by the ballistic calculator).
 
Those of you that say this was not an accident need to look up the definition of the word accident. Yes, he was negligent; it was still an accident. Several automobile accidents happen every day because of negligence.
 
dfw-teacher, while it varies from state to state, the typical standard for the cutoff between simple negligence and criminal negligence is along the lines of: a reasonable person would know such action was likely to result in death or serious injury.

Shooting a rifle into the air, especially in an area with multiple houses and roads, could easily meet such a cutoff, which would raise the accident into a crime.
 
I'm not saying it is not a crime. I definitely believe this is a crime. Why can't it be both? I don't think this has to be an either/or situation.
 
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