Eli5 If you shoot a bullet into the air how does it gain enough velocity on the way down to kill someone?
In: 5
Gravity.
In the absence of air, the bullet would land with the same speed it started with. It would slow down on the way up as it gained altitude, then regain the same speed on its way back down.
In reality, air resistance slows bullets pretty substantially, but bullets are smooth and dense, so it doesn’t slow them down as much as it would need to to make them safe. A typical terminal velocity for a bullet is a few hundred miles per hour, which is slower than a bullet freshly fired from a gun, but still more than enough to do damage when it hits.
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