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Somebody in the vicinity of 18th and South Van Ness is building up an arsenal

Posted Jul 11, 2011 at 2:21 pm by
Categories: Crime

Watch your backs!

11 comments

11 Responses to “Somebody in the vicinity of 18th and South Van Ness is building up an arsenal”

  1. Delegate Nerd says:
    July 11, 2011 at 2:52 pm

    http://www.viceland.com/int/v12n7/htdocs/rat.php

  2. Glenparker says:
    July 11, 2011 at 3:18 pm

    Tis illegal to have a BB gun in SF even with the excuse of just plinking hipsters in the ass with one.

  3. Stephan Zielinski says:
    July 11, 2011 at 3:23 pm

    The Crosman 764SB is an air rifle, $45.61 at Amazon, capable of firing a pellet at about 600 feet per second. Assuming an eight grain pellet, muzzle energy is about 8.7 joules. For comparison, a lightly-loaded low-velocity .22 LR cartridge fired from a Saturday Night Special means a bullet with about 141 joules. For that matter, a baseball hurled at fifty miles an hour clocks in at 37 joules.

    You wouldn’t want to get hit in the eye with it, but you wouldn’t want to get hit in the eye with an enraged ladybug, either.

    • Herr Doktor Professor Deth Vegetable says:
      July 11, 2011 at 4:36 pm

      But the surface area of a baseball is a hell of a lot bigger than the surface area of a pellet, so that energy is much more spread out. No?

      • Stephan Zielinski says:
        July 11, 2011 at 4:57 pm

        True, of course; and that concentration of energy in a smaller surface area also means that a .22 LR bullet is not merely 3.8 times as dangerous as a baseball… Still, for our purposes, the numbers serve to illustrate that we’re talking about a distinct lack of oomph, here.

        • Herr Doktor Professor Deth Vegetable says:
          July 11, 2011 at 5:06 pm

          That’s true, but for that same reason it seems like the energy-required-to-propel-mass-of-projectile is not as useful a metric as, say, force-per-contact-area of projectile when it comes to determining the danger said projectile presents.

          Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that pellet guns should or should not be legal. I’m just thinking about the physics.

          • Stephan Zielinski says:
            July 11, 2011 at 9:24 pm

            Force-per-contact-area could indeed be a useful thing to compute when trying to figure out what’s going to happen when projectile P impacts target T, but it’s going to vary a lot depending on the nature of T– higher for a hard bit like the forehead, and lower for a soft bit like the thigh.

            If nothing else, the total energy involved puts an upper limit on how much total rearrangement of bits-o’-the-target can take place.

  4. Genau says:
    July 11, 2011 at 10:58 pm

    Fuck that…they got free Glocks in sandboxes in the Viz…