A lot of this stuff is “doing something” to calm people down. People are losing their minds.
Where I live in upstate NY, Nextdoor.com was losing its shit over a “drone”, actually a lidar mapping plane, and some of the dumber people were suggesting taking shots at the Iranians.
I’m waiting for the next seemingly inevitable object lesson: it’s insanely illegal, federally illegal, to shoot at flying objects, for what I would have hoped were obvious reasons. But it seems we’re still really rather dumb as a collective.
It's maybe worth mentioning that the obvious reasons almost entirely have to do with the things you'd hit in the air, not once the bullet descended. If everyone on earth suddenly shot upward at around 80 degrees from the ground, you'd expect approximately zero casualties on average from the bullets falling and lethally striking surface objects (there would be a number of welts and bruises as well as minor property damage, but even that is less likely than you might suspect).
People are routinely killed by falling bullets. It turns out that the vast majority of idiots firing blindly into the air don't know or care to shoot only straight up, and it would be the same problem for whichever idiots were trying to shoot down drones.
Do you have a citation for that? I can't find any numbers on people getting hit by falling bullets, let alone fatalities. Things let celebratory gunfire don't seem to be comparable since people tend to congregate outside for celebrations resulting in larger groups of potential unintentional targets.
I have not logged the citations, but I distinctly recall reading on the order of one-two news reports per year of people being killed by falling bullets in multiple different countries, including US, Brazil, and several middle eastern countries.
Also, injuries and one fatality were confirmed by Mythbusters in [0]. Read the account for Episode 50, which was the only myth to receive all three ratings (Busted, Plausible, and Confirmed) at the same time.
I'm not sure that's at all the same thing with the extremely high rate of violent crime involving guns in Brazil. Pointing a gun straight at a city background, missing your specific target, and still injuring/killing somebody is very different from pointing a gun at the sky and having the 170 ft/s bullet fall, manage to hit that same highly populated region, and cause problems.
The point is that all sky-pointed bullets are NOT going only 170ft/sec.
Yes, it is reasonably established that bullets fired straight up do not regain their initial velocity on the way back down.
But, at less-than-vertical firing angles, they can retain a lot of their initial 4-figure-fps velocity, and how much is very dependent on particular trajectory, wind, bullet composition, and initial angle. Dependent enough that it's specifically outlawed in many states.
So, don't go glibly firing off skyward celebratory shots (over)confident in your understanding of the physics (or implicitly advocating it). You might be willing to take the risk, but no one else is willingly undertaking the risk you are creating.
I honestly can't believe that people would argue that they should be allowed to fire guns up in the air, lmao. You & I both know people don't indicate while driving, so I'm sure we're not that surprised, though.
No, I agree. Brazil is likely leaning towards immediate contact and absorption of small arms in that localized region of conflict rather than horizon aimed rifle fire like you’d expect with people shooting at traditional aircraft they believe is as close as a drone would be, towards what I presume would be a residential, no-fly zone, military airspace, etc.
It’s really not the collective. It’s every town and cities loonies that now have formed a small but vocal subset of the population thanks to the Internet.
Where I live in upstate NY, Nextdoor.com was losing its shit over a “drone”, actually a lidar mapping plane, and some of the dumber people were suggesting taking shots at the Iranians.