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Comment by Grazester | Hacker News Reader

The article says they were shooting into the air

I wouldn't assume it was accidental. There were rifle attacks on power stations in California back in 2014 that came very close to causing widespread blackouts in one of our most densely populated areas. It took them 27 days to get the station back up and running. Imagine LA without power for a month... They considered that a dress rehearsal and a message. Maybe this is similar?

Well the article says they were in a car shooting into the air. I would assume some street criminal was having fun or doing a drive by warning by shooting into the air from inside their car but who knows.

There were also targeted attacks against AT&T infrastructure in the Bay Area:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/more-california-...

It was fiber optic cable so you can't blame copper theft as the motive, sabotage was clearly intended.

In this case, Oakland being Oakland, it could just as well have been hoodlums trying to show off their marksmanship.

And before that https://www.wired.com/2009/04/cable-sabotage/

> It was fiber optic cable so you can't blame copper theft as the motive, sabotage was clearly intended.

It very well could be. But, people who steal things often do so hastily.

They were trying to shoot the air and missed!?

Gravity.

You shoot into the air and what goes up must come down. And still has velocity.

Terminal velocity. What is that going to hurt?

Most people are not shooting straight up vertically. In practice, they are typically shooting at a high angle such that it creates a long arc and this would not be first time something (or someone) got shot at a distance that no one intended to shoot.

In most cases, "celebratory gunfire" is harmless. In some cases though, people end up injured or dead - there's a decent sized list on Wikipedia [1]. The key issue is, you only have "terminal velocity" at play when shooting up straight at 90 degrees in the air. The more "sideways" you get from that, the more energy will be kept during the fall.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire

And drag applies to any direction of travel, if terminal velocity for a small, dense object like a bullet was reached as quickly as willis936 thinks firearms would have much shorter maximum ranges.

I had a projectile take out one of the PV panels on my roof. Judging by the hole it was a bullet, though I didn't find anything - if it was a meteorite I would be more excited (and more disappointed not to have found it).

And lethal, as with this senseless death a few weeks ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/21/british-man-...

That was through the wall not the ceiling. Bullets fired into air and returning to earth (assuming straight up so little to no horizontal velocity) don’t have the kinetic energy to go through a roof and kill someone.

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