Yes, this includes you, Foreign Minister, Polymath, and Air Marshal.

Over at Volokh there has been a sub-discussion about the stopping power of bullets. Some have argued that bullets cannot knock someone down. They say that the equal-and-opposite reaction (recoil) would knock the shooter down if the bullet had that much kick.

SayUncle says:

“Sorry, Eugene, but despite the movies, a hit from a bullet doesn’t knock you down (generally). you may fall or lay down but no knock down. If a round fired from a gun could knock someone down, the expulsion from the barrel would also knock the person doing the shooting down”

This just seems wrong to me.

First of all, I’ve seen my 307 round knock a deer clean over. I guess you could argue that the deer fell over when the round ripped through its heart and lungs. But my brain image has the deer falling over at the same instant the round arrives.

Secondly, I recall that the 45 was introduced during the Philippine Insurrection to counter the danger of the charging Filipinos. Wrapped in newspaper and stoned to the gills, the rebels would charge American lines with spears. The Americans would shoot, delivering fatal wounds, but the dying Filipinos’ forward momentum would carry them into American trenches where they would flail about with edged weapons as they died. My understanding is that the 45 became widespread because it knocked them on their asses and negated their forward momentum.

Thirdly, it seems to me that the recoil is distributed over a wider area of the body then the bullet.

Fourthly, I don’t think my shoulder absorbs all of that “equal and opposite reaction.” If the recoil translates the kinetic energy of the bullet to approximately twelve square inches of my shoulder and the round delivers all of its impact on .07 square inches of the target (.307 diamater = pi*.1535 squared) then my shoulder is feeling about 1/161th of the flesh at the point of round impact. The recoil is negligible, and even magnified by a multiplier of 161, it seems to me that it ought to hurt more. Doesn’t a fair amount of the energy released by the firing action exit sideways, expelling the spent casing as it goes?

But what do I know? I’ve come to the gun thing late and, being a humble servant of the soil, basic physics calculations are well beyond my tiny agrarian brain. So if all of you gun nuts and rocket scientists could enlighten me about whether bullets actually can knock people down, I’d appreciate it.