A years-old joke suggesting Floridians are dumb enough to shoot bullets at hurricanes has resurfaced as Dorian approaches the Southeastern United States. Take a look:
Obviously, the reason behind not firing guns into a hurricane is rather simple: the strong wind gusts could fling the bullets anywhere, potentially killing or injuring somebody else. According to Inverse, the helpful graphic actually originated in 2017 by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence during Hurricane Florence.
“If you shoot any bullet into a hurricane, it will travel fast enough to kill someone, but its trajectory will be blown way off course, making it nearly impossible to predict where it will land,” noted Inverse. “It will, inevitably, hit something or someone. As with any time you shoot blindly into the air, you never know where your bullet might come to a rest.”
“The AR-15 typically fires a bullet that’s 5.56 mm in diameter and 45 mm long,” continued Inverse. “According to Federal Premium Ammunition’s ballistic calculator, after traveling 500 yards the bullet’s velocity would fall to 1,152 fps — or 785 mph. This is still really freaking fast. Plus it would be delivering 147 foot-pounds of energy, which is a combination of velocity and energy that creates more than enough power to break the skin and cause serious injury or death.”
Since not firing a bullet into a speeding hurricane should be a universal idea with no need for a warning, people on social media responded to the graphic in jest while making political statements about President Trump.
“They’re for same ppl for whom shampoo instructions are printed at back of shampoo bottles,” said one user.
“No one could have predicted that the country that elected Donald Trump president would also be the country that has to warn its residents not to open fire on a hurricane,” said another user.
“This country blows, we can’t even shoot hurricanes anymore? What’s the point of ANY of this?!?!”
The warning comes shortly after Axios reported that President Trump himself casually floated to White House advisors the idea of potentially derailing hurricanes by way of nuclear weapons, a conversation he vehemently denies happening.
“Trump said, ‘I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?’ according to one source who was there,” Axios reported earlier this week. “‘They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?’ the source added, paraphrasing the president’s remarks.
The source also told Axios that Trump’s alleged suggestion was apparently so absurd to the people hearing it that they literally fell silent.
“You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with this?'” the source said.
“Alarm bells weren’t going off when I heard about it, but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into ‘the president is crazy’ narrative,” another anonymous source told Axios.
Trump denounced the story shortly after the publication denouncing it as “fake news.”
“The story by Axios that President Trump wanted to blow up large hurricanes with nuclear weapons prior to reaching shore is ridiculous,” he tweeted. “I never said this. Just more FAKE NEWS!”