When ruthless anti-gun activists pick up guns, who will they shoot first?

My satirical novel on US gun culture, TARGET 91, has just been published by Penmore Press. 

I became interested in the maths of guns when trying to work out why “Dirty” Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in the film 

carries a Smith & Wesson Model 29,  .44 Magnum.

What’s this .44?

The caliber of guns in the USA is the diameter of the bullet measured in decimalised inches.

.44 = .44 inch

Why write satire on such a serious topic?

Because HUMOUR HAS THE POWER TO TAKE ILLOGICAL THINKING TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION.

TARGET 91 includes illogical and often hilarious thinking on both sides of this debate.

More at Penmore Press here.

You’ll find TARGET 91 print copy & ebook on AMAZON  USA, UK and finally now on AMAZON AUS. (ebook to follow).

Also KOBO, SMASHWORDS and Barnes&Noble NOOK and Apple iBook.

1. You can duck a bullet

You will find all the ballistics stats you need here:

2.You can out run a fireball?

In nearly every Action Movie our hero possibly holding hands with his love interest will run and jump ( just in time ) out of the way of explosion. eg. Man on Fire (2004) with Denzel Washington, The Marine (2006) with John Triton, Mad MAX FURY ROAD (2015) with Charlize Theron and Predator 2 (1990) with Danny Glover .

We will use car bomb stats that come from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. (We in Australia can only assume this bureau exists because, um , there are many exploding cigars in America.) You will find these at Car Bomb Response.

 

3. You can out run machine gun fire

Mathspig is amazed. She didn’t think there would be any hope of survival. But if the baddies sweep the machine gun tracking you as you run then …. see calcs below.

Are you feeling lucky Punk?

4. If you are involved in a car chase, hijacking, explosion, volcanic eruption or alien invasion, you will not go into shock.

Here are just a few of the popular disaster movies:
Avalanche (2001), Earthquake (1974), Armageddon (Involves meteors 1998), Deep Impact (More meteors 1998), 2012 (Tsunamis, earthquakes, the lot. 2009), Twister (tornadoes 1996), Backdraft (Fire. 1991) and Towering Inferno (They don’t make thunderous movie titles like that anymore. (1974)  

But what percentage of people involved in, say, an explosion suffer from SHOCK! There are many statistics about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) available. In one excellent study in The National Centre for PTSD Journal involved an explosion in a paint factory in Norway (1976), the 246 employees were ranked for their exposure to shock as follows:.

A. 66 Narrow escape

B. 59 Involved but not in danger

C. 121 Not present on the day.

 80% Group A suffered shock and PTSD. Both Groups A & B showed symptoms of PTSD 7 months later. If, say, a plane crashed into your school sports field and your class survived with minor injuries calculate  how many students in your maths class would go into SHOCK and how many would be left to take action using the above statistics.

These stats can also be used as a fraction or decimal exercise using 0.8 or 4/5 as the fraction of students in shock.

More information at the Health Dept WA

NOTE: Many schools in Australia today not only practise fire drills but terrorist attack lockdowns.

5. You can jump out of an airplane that is about to crash and catch the baddie who took the last parachute.

 The names Bond, James Bond. In Moonraker  with Roger Moore (1979) 007 jumps out of a plane without a parachute to avoid an assassination attempt. He catches up with, Jaws, arch-baddie, in mid-air and takes his parachute. Jaws survives his fall by landing on a big top circus tent.

In Point Break with FBI agent Johnny Utah, Keanu Reeves, leaps from a skydiving plane after Patrick Swayzes’ characer, Bohdi, who has taken the last parachute. Utah catches Bohdi in mid-air, and after a tense confrontation with a gun, both survive using Bodhi’s chute. The remake was in 2015.

There are more movie and real life stories at the  Free Fall Maths link.

Note: We’ll assume Bhodi and Utah have equal horizontal velocities (plane exit velocity plus wind) so the following calculations only involve the vertical or falling velocity. The terminal velocities used for Bhodi and Utah are realistic estimates. 

6. If the pilot dies the control tower can talk you down.

So mathpigs, here is a small taste of what you would need to do to land a small aircraft in an emergency if the pilot is unconscious/dead.

A = Airspeed

Find airspeed indicator on instrument panel.

Instrument Panel Piper PA-28

Check speed.

Knots or mph or kph?

Avoid red zone. Too fast.

Knots outer scale. mph inner scale. Recommended velocity between blue & red.

B = Contact nearest air traffic controllers. 

1. Call MayDay MayDay MayDay

2.  Look for plane ID. It will be on instrument panel somewhere.

3. Check fuel.

On the Piper Cherokee there are 2 fuel tanks, R & L. Check both.

Check aircraft operating handbook to see fuel consumption and remaining time in air.

Quick calc.

 

C = Checklist

Follow Emergency Landing Checklist in aircraft operating handbook for Power OFF or Power ON landing.

Keep in mind, if your air speed is too low you can drop from air, but the higher the landing speed the bigger crash.

Crash energy increases with the square of speed. It’s a parabola!!!!!

The likelihood of a passenger with

NO flying experience landing a plane safely in an emergency is

very small.

The likelihood of a passenger with

NO MATHS skills landing a plane safely in an emergency is

ZERO.