Babies and young children have thinner skin, while the elderly have thicker but low-elasticity skin, making it easier to tear or puncture. Healthy adults tend to have the most difficult skin to puncture, as it's both thick and high in elasticity. There are also enormous variations in how easy it is to puncture skin: both from person-to-person and across different places on an individual's body. Wikimedia Commons users Madhero88 and M.Komorniczak Your armpits have particularly thin skin. Various thicknesses of skin are found on varying locations on the human body, and often correlate. 30 caliber bullet will break skin at only 85 miles-per-hour. 9mm handgun bullets can break skin at just 102 miles-per-hour,.38 caliber revolver break skin at 130 miles-per-hour, buckshot will perforate skin at 145 miles-per-hour,.For instance ( according to Mattoo's equation): Some combinations of perfectly round bullets impacting thick skin will bounce off a human at speeds up to 225 miles-per-hour, but that's the ideal case.Ī pointier bullet can move slower and still break the skin, as will a smaller-caliber bullet, having its force concentrated over a much smaller area. In general, the accepted threshold for where a bullet will break the skin barrier is 136 miles-per-hour, but the true figure varies wildly. The type of bullet used is tremendously important for determining whether it's possible for a bullet to break your skin or not, as well as the type of skin in question. Bobbfwed at the English language Wikipedia these bullets will all come down at different speeds. Even at the same muzzle velocity, when fired up.

Various weights, sizes and calibers of bullets.

If a bullet has enough speed to break the skin, it can potentially be lethal this occurs at different speeds for different bullets and different individual people.

Bullets that are fired at an angle, rather than straight up, may never stop and begin tumbling instead, they can maintain much greater speeds: many hundreds of miles-per-hour.

But in terms of location, bullets that are fired even straight up can actually come back down up to two miles (about three kilometers) away from where they were fired.Ī 150 mile-per-hour bullet won't be lethal in most instances, but there are two factors that can change the equation dramatically. In terms of speed and energy, this simple treatment does, in fact, correctly give us the properties of a bullet fired up into the air when it hits the ground. incendiary machine gun bullet with a blowtorch in a World War II-era accident. The patient was injured while heating a 0.50 caliber.

Can a falling bullet penetrate a roof