by Bruce BethkeI held off posting this Tuesday morning because I didn't want to step on the ruminating goat. It's just as well that I did, as the post as originally written wandered off into a long and complicated adventure in atmospheric effects and acoustic physics—which, after all, is my field.
This week's topic was inspired by hearing the Talking Heads on my car radio. Specifically:
"The sound of gunfire, off in the distance,That must be a New York thing. Hereabouts, the sound of gunfire off in the distance just means it's deer or goose season. So just what does distant gunfire sound like?
I'm getting used to it now."-"Life During Wartime"
Weather makes a huge difference. I live about three miles as the bullet flies from an outdoor rifle and shotgun range, and under the right weather conditions the popping of gunfire sounds as clear as if it was just down the block. Conversely, as one of my more interesting neighbors once demonstrated, under lousy weather conditions you can empty the magazine of an SKS rifle in your backyard and not disturb the neighbors a half-block away.
Direction is also important. A gun being fired at you is one hell of a lot louder than a gun being fired in the opposite direction, and it's not all psychological. There's an old soldier's saying that you never hear the one that hits you; I'm pretty certain that's true, as while I've never been an old soldier, I have worked as a target-setter and scorer in high-powered silhouette matches, which mostly involves sitting in a bunker, listening to the bullets fly past, and hoping that whoever is controlling the firing line doesn't screw up when he signals you that it's safe to come out of the bunker and reset the targets. I can assure you that when you're a hundred yards or more downrange, and people are firing high-powered weapons—which is to say, supersonic bullets—in your direction, you hear the THUNK! of the bullet hitting the target well before you hear the bang of the gun going off.
One other thing about high-powered weapons: even though it seems like such a tiny thing, a bullet traveling at Mach 1 or better still creates a sonic boom, which you hear as a distinct crack! a few microseconds after the bullet goes by and definitely well before you hear the bang of the gun being fired. So by the time you hear the sound gunfire in your direction, the bullet has already either hit or missed you. (And in the case of some of your higher-velocity varmint cartridges—say, the .22-250—the ear-splitting CRACK! from the bullet's shock wave is considerably louder than the initial firing of the rifle, which would seem to argue against the value of putting a "silencer" on a high-powered rifle.)
Finally, one more thing: I have never heard a ricochet whistle or whine off into the distance, the way they always do in the movies. I have heard tumbling bullets hum past, like very large, fast, and angry bumblebees. I'm not saying that they can't whistle, or that under the right conditions they might not. But in forty years of shooting, I've never heard it.
Any questions?
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