Check out the footage at around the 0:50 mark, again at the 1:30 mark.
These prarie-dogs probably weigh 2-3#. Yet the impact of the rifle (which I presume is of .224 caliber) sends them easily 10’+ into the air. Yet if I were to take a .224 AR “pistol” and only support it at a 45* angle, it wouldn’t go NEARLY that far.
Why does the effect of the bullet on this target far exceed that of the bullet’s effect on the weapon/shooter?
THese varmint-hunting videos have long fascinated me for this reason. Can anyone shed any light on this?
I was serious. To me, it looks like the bullet is exerting more “force” on the target than the shooter/rifle.
The only thing I can come up with is this force is being exerted “faster”, so more effect is noted. However, I have seen videos of people wearing vests hit with .308’s and the like and the effect looked equal, so I don’t know.
well… the weapon itself absorbs a lot of the recoil, then disperses it over the shoulder via the buttstock. the bullet, which is traveling between 2700-3200 FPS and revolving at 250,000rpm, is striking a mostly liquid, stationary object and exploding on contact. the dog is very light and fragile… i can’t really explain it, as i’m not a physicist, but it doesn’t seem to defy any laws to me, having been shooting things that often react violently when shot for a long time.
that round smacks the shit out of whatever it hits… a bitch-slap to a face can knock a person over, but rarely knocks over the smacker, no?
OK I have read enough in this thread to feel that it is necessary to give the real physics of the argument here.
Newton’s Second Law reads F =ma, or Force equals mass * acceleration.
Acceleration = change in velocity (or scalar value speed) over change in time, A = dV/dt
Now you have to understand what is different between firing the round, and the round impacting the target. The object doing the acceleration is the bullet, therefore the mass is the same whether you are firing the bullet from the gun, or it is impacting the target. What is changing is the acceleration.
Going from 0fps to 3000fps or 3000fps to 0 fps is the same magnitude of velocity change, the difference is the amount of time which you to it in.
Acceleration is change in velocity over the change in time
When firing the weapon the bullet is accelerating down a long tube, and therefore taking a larger amount of time to go from stand still to rifle bullet speed. Since force is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes, you will have less force. Now on the other end you are going from 3000fps to 0fps in a VERY VERY short period of time, therefore the denominator in out dV/dt is much much smaller, and therefore the magnitude of the force is much much greater.
Note I have abridged things like energy and impulse for the sake of simplicity, however this is the gist of the argument.
How much does the shooter weigh and how much does the rifle weigh?
The effect on a 2lb prarie dog getting shot with a round is not the same as the effect of an 8lb rifle recoiling against a 150lb shooter. Also, the recoil is dispersed through the width of the stock and the recoil pad, as opposed to being concentrated on the prarie dog by the bullet’s impact.
To get a similar effect you would need to see what would happen to a 2lb prarie dog if it detonated a .222 remington shell’s primer while holding the case in something that would prevent the case from rupturing and direct the force back at the creature detonating it.
Don’t ask me how you would set up an experiment like that.
So basically, the old addage of “shotguns don’t knock people shot with them through walls or they would knock shooters through walls” is total BS. A round on-target can indeed have more effect than the round launched does upon the launcher.
That is due to the more rapid deceleration on the target.
no… thats still totally true. shotgun shot impacting a large object aren’t going to have any more effect than against a large object firing the weapon. there’s no correlation between a man getting hit with shotgun shot and a prairie dog getting hit with a varmint load.
a closer example would be a prairie dog getting hit with a .223 round and a man getting hit with an artillery shell.
Not the way I see it. Ever see the recoil of that artillery cannon? It weighs much more than a man, and recoils VERY violently. A varmint-rifle barely moves, with or without your shoulder against the stock, yet it flings a rock-chuck of the same weight a yard or two in the air.
So basically, the old addage of “shotguns don’t knock people shot with them through walls or they would knock shooters through walls” is total BS. A round on-target can indeed have more effect than the round launched does upon the launcher.
That is due to the more rapid deceleration on the target.
I’m aware of several police officers shot squarely in the torso with shotgun slugs, the slugs stopped by their soft body armor, and the officers not being incapacitated, nor are they knocked on their ass. There cannot be any more “rapid deceleration” on a living target than that.
In the video “Deadly Effects” producer/director Alexander Jason is shot with a 7.62x51mm FAL while wearing hard body armor and standing on one foot. He barely moves when the bullet impacts him.
In 1989, Jamie Martin Wise was shot squarely in the back of his torso with a .223 Remington bullet during a hostage standoff with Alexandria, VA, PD. The bullet nicked a vertebra, cut his aorta and came to rest in his liver. After being shot he was able to shoot and kill SWAT officer Charles Hill, pump his shotgun and shoot and wound SWAT officer Andrew Chelchowski before he was finally stopped by a hail of police bullets.
A varmint-rifle barely moves, with or without your shoulder against the stock, yet it flings a rock-chuck of the same weight a yard or two in the air.
What is the mass of the rifle in comparison to the mass of the rock chuck? Keeping in mind that the temporary cavity expands at a velocity of about 1/10th of the velocity of the bullet, the mass of the tissue being displaced, and the pressures produced in soft tissues reaching over 1000 PSI, then it shouldn’t come as any surprise that small animals can be propelled into the air.
I bet if you somehow made a ONE pound .223 rifle, put it on a table, and made it go off without holding it, it would go flying at least 6-12 feet.
In that experiment, using the Force=Mass*Acceleration equation, Mass would be constant. I think this is the deceptive part. A prarie dog weighs so little. Your rifle, and body weigh so much, but still recoil 1/4 of an inch or so.
Think of it this way too. Hypothetically speaking, If you grabbed that prairie dog, put it in a sling shot, you would only have to pull back 1 foot to send it flying at least 10 feet in the air.:eek: I would not anticipate any more recoil from that slingshot than from the rifle.
Rockchucks are equal in weight to an M4. Yet if you held the M4 bu the trigger and jerked it, I doubt that M4 would fly 3’ into the air from where you held it.
WS6–You are ENTIRELY missing the point. It is the temporary stretch that is shredding the animals and causing pieces of meat to fly through the air–it has NOTHING to do with momentum, recoil, or other such factors.
Hit a person with a something that creates a dramatically larger stretch cavity than can be contained within the human body and you would see EXACTLY the same effect.
As a rough example, visualize inserting a 60 mm mortar shell in the rectum and detonating it and you will begin to get a sense of this…
Rockchucks are equal in weight to an M4. Yet if you held the M4 bu the trigger and jerked it, I doubt that M4 would fly 3’ into the air from where you held it.
Recoil energy is dissipated over a greater period of time by the mechanical movement of the M4’s action.
well the whole animal isn’t flying 10 feet in the air, just chunks of it are. you’d have to weigh the chunks to get a realistic idea of what kind of energy we’re talking about.
it’s also worth considering that a 223 bullet, fired straight up would go several thousand feet.
so figure prairie dog bits, weight 100 times more than the bullet could potentially go over 10 feet into the air.
