why didn’t the police officers chasing O.J. Simpson shoot his tires?
In: Physics
Because life isn’t like the movies.
First of all, tires are not that easy to hit. Side-on, they are a rather narrow target (and also likely to be moving w.r.t. the shooter, unless you can somehow match the target car’s speed perfectly and maintain a constant distance to it). From the front or the back (which is where you will be more likely shooting from), the top of the tire is blocked by the car’s body, so you can only aim for the bottom, and this gets harder if the car has a long tail or if the shooter is having to aim from higher up. Also, in a car chase, you yourself are moving as well and you’re having to fire out of a car, which makes it hard to hit anything with accuracy, let alone a narrow, moving target. And this only even works if there’s more than one person in the car, which very often isn’t the case in highway patrol vehicles.
So, you’re likely to miss, which brings me to the next point: collateral damage. If you’re chasing a vehicle through traffic, your first and foremost concern is the safety of all these other people. Firing a gun with a high risk of missing your target isn’t going to help with that. What if either of your cars swerves unexpectedly? What if the bullet ricochets off the road surface, or the target vehicle’s metal parts, and hits another vehicle? What if, you know, you just aim badly and end up hitting another vehicle or person?
Speaking of safety, what if you *do* manage to hit a tire? What do you expect to happen then? The car will gently but swiftly roll to a controlled stop? Unfortunately, that’s not likely. Instead, one of two things is likely to happen. The first is that the tire, having just received a small puncture, will deflate slowly, which doesn’t do much to stop the chase. If you have really bad luck, the tire is one of those self-sealing or run-flat ones which can just keep going. The second possibility is that the tire does “blow” catastrophically, in which case this may well cause the driver to lose control of their vehicle, and run into other traffic at high speed. Not a great outcome either.
In short, it just isn’t worth the risk, and the risk is rather high.
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