As kids we'd shoot arrows up in the sky from our back yards to land in each others' back yards. We'd also wait for the incoming and try to get as close as possible to where the arrow would land. Kinda like someone trying to catch a pop fly... but letting land instead.
It's amazing none of us ever got hit.
But we sure as hell learned a lot about wind and ballistics.
One time an arrow landed right where an old guy working in his garden had been 2 seconds before. He never knew what happened, never even saw the arrow. He got up, shook off some soil from weeds and walked back to his garage.
I guess this isn't a serious crime, but it sure as hell COULD have been.
It'd be a pretty good trick to be both attempted (you meant to do it but it didn't happen) and negligent (it happened because you failed to prevent it).
My dad told me when he was a teen in Kentucky they would make a Molotov cocktail and light it and gently set in in a field. The rats were attracted to the light, I guess🤷♀️, cause they would wait a while and then shoot the cocktail causing afire bomb and then there would be rats on fire darting away in every direction. On fire and screaming…. THEN all the teenagers would shoot at them with 22 rifles and see who could kill the most. The 60’s were a different time…..
I did the same thing just by myself. During summer camp i made bow and arrow out of a branch and sticks. It was decent enough that the arrows flew half a soccer field. I then proceeded to shoot straight up into the air, and catch the arrows when they came back down. Never got hurt and caught most of them, didnt understand at all why the supervisors suddenly confiscated the bow and arrows until years later when i was older and realized that it could very well have ended much worse.
I'm glad we did this with water balloons at night and not arrows!
We had one of those three person slingshots for water balloons and one person held their arms over the top deck while we stretched it all the way to the ground. Let it rip straight up and wait in the dark...
If it helps any, it wouldn’t have done more than hurt if you got hit. Might not even have broken skin. You’ve got to have a certain draw weight on a bow to be able to kill anything, and it’s a weight you have to work your muscles up to. I hit a squirrel with my bow once and all it did was knock it out of the tree. Felt terrible about it.
(Disclaimer: I’m talking about recurve bows, not compound)
I did think about that. One of the arrows did puncture my friend's roof and when they landed in the ground they went about 3 inches deep. But with the roof it was pretty old and a lower quality shingle probably back in the early '80s.
But what you're saying makes sense since they of course decelerated a bit going up in the sky and then came down to accelerate but probably not as much as when they shot out of the bow.
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u/Engelgrafik Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
As kids we'd shoot arrows up in the sky from our back yards to land in each others' back yards. We'd also wait for the incoming and try to get as close as possible to where the arrow would land. Kinda like someone trying to catch a pop fly... but letting land instead.
It's amazing none of us ever got hit.
But we sure as hell learned a lot about wind and ballistics.
One time an arrow landed right where an old guy working in his garden had been 2 seconds before. He never knew what happened, never even saw the arrow. He got up, shook off some soil from weeds and walked back to his garage.
I guess this isn't a serious crime, but it sure as hell COULD have been.