From: jgd@dixie.com (John De Armond)
Newsgroups: rec.guns
Subject: Re: .22 LR can kill at 1 mile
Date: 11 Nov 92 20:53:36 GMT
Organization: Dixie Communications Public Access.  The Mouth of the South.

th2_oate@csd.uwe-bristol.ac.uk (Tom Oates) writes:

#I can't help you regarding the angle of fire. However, I can certify that
#when a box of .22LR states that it can kill or injure someone at a range
#of over a mile - it's not exaggerating. I have read several newspaper accounts
#of people being killed or injured by stray .22LR bullets that were
#fired by some yo-yo who thought they wouldn't have any 'whack' left in 
#them after travelling so far. I recall one incident that occurred about
#5 years ago in the UK: A farmer was out 'varminting' with his bolt-action 
#in .22LR. He killed a few and went home. Later, the Police came round and 
#questioned him about an incident that had happened earlier that afternoon: 
#a little girl aged about 7 years old had been playing in her back garden 
#(about a mile from the farm) when someone shot her in the side of the head 
#with a .22. They took his rifle away to the forensic lab for testing. You 
#can probably figure out the rest of this story for yourself. The Police 
#were lenient with him because it was an accident and not intentional. 
#However, afterwards that man had to live the painful knowledge that he had 
#killed a child.

While acknowledging that people have been killed by mere taps to the 
temple, the numbers in this case just don't add up.  I decided to
run a ballistic calculation on a .22.    I've used numbers from 
Remington high velocity .22 ammo fired from my Model 55 match rifle.
Stingers, et al, will be faster but the bullet is lighter.  Ballistic
coefficient taken from the Speer book for a 40 gr .22 hornet bullet.
#From Frenchu's BALISTIC program:

                                .22 cal bullet 
                       (Calculated using Ingalls' table)
      Bullet Weight .........  40 grains   Bullet Caliber ........ 0.224   
      Sectional Density ..... 0.114        Coefficient of Form ... 0.791   
      Effective Bal. Coeff... 0.144        Bal. Coeff. at STP .... 0.144   
      Cross wind ............ 10.0 m.p.h.  Altitude .............. 0    Ft.
      Atmospheric pressure .. 30.00 in.    Temperature ........... 60.0 F  

    Range  Velocity  Energy   Momentum  Mx. Ord. Defl.   Drop   Lead   Time
    yards   f.p.s.   ft-lb.   lb.-sec.    in.     in.     in.  in/mph  sec.
       0     1000      88.8    0.1776     0.0     0.0     0.0    0.0   0.000
     239      771      52.8    0.1370    32.8    18.8   120.3   14.5   0.824
     478      611      33.1    0.1085   169.2    76.9   577.2   32.9   1.871
     717      484      20.8    0.0860   493.9   183.3  1568.1   56.2   3.192
     956      383      13.1    0.0681  1146.7   350.7  3402.4   85.5   4.860
    1195      304       8.2    0.0540  2370.1   595.1  6563.6  122.6   6.966

Note that the program would not let me do a calculation out to a mile.
1195 yards is the program limit for this version.  Linearly extrapolating
to 1760 yards (1 mile) puts the velocity at about 200 fps.  I believe these
calculations to be conservative, considering that they are at the limit
of the ballistic algorithm built into BALISTIC.

In any event, a 40 grain bullet is not going to hurt anyone going 200 fps
unless it happened to hit an eye and then it would not kill.  Even 300
fps is not going to do much more than sting.  300 fps is about half the
velocity of an average .22 cal pellet rifle.  Indeed, I have one of
the super cheapo chinese made air rifles that sell for under $15 at
the gun shows that chronos out to almost 700 fps.

The label on the box says RANGE 1 mile.  As computed above, the bullet
will indeed go a mile and still have a tiny bit of velocity left.
I'm having a lot of trouble with the "girl killed a mile away by
farmer with a .22" line.  I've seen similar reports in papers here
in the US.  My inclination is to label it an urban legend (rural legend?),
though I will acknowledge that it is possible for some little girl
somewhere, already predisposed to some fatal problem, dying after being
struck by a .22 bullet, perhaps from a dislodged blood clot or something.  
I will NOT accept the claim that someone was killed by bullet penetration
from a .22 fired a mile away.

John
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