C.S.I. Miami – Bullet Stabilizers
I know it seems like I post a lot about C.S.I. Miami. That may be because they push the reality barriers more than other dramas. More likely, it’s because I’ve been watching a lot of C.S.I. Miami lately. With a 16-month-old around the house, you tend to get a little behind on your favorite shows. The summer reruns give you a chance to catch up.
Nonetheless, I’m Calling Bull to Horatio Cane and his crew once again. In the episode Sink or Swim, an Attorney (played convincingly by P.Diddy) is throwing a party on his yacht. His fiance’ is killed during an "Only-In-Miami" style pirate raid. The later captured pirates (no eye patches, sorry) say there’s no way they killed the girl. They say they fired their shots straight into the air. When the C.S.I.’s studied the body more closely, they discovered a long thin piece of metal lodged in the wound.
It was identified as a bullet stabilizer used for shooting underwater. From that they determined that the woman was killed by a diver beneath the surface of the water. BULL!!!
Apparently, this stabilizer is designed to lead the way for a bullet passing through water allowing that bullet to avoid the turbulance and deflections that it would normally encounter. I guess, in theory, I can see how such a device would allow a bullett to travel straighter. When a bullet it going through the water, there is a tremendous pressure wave that travels in front of it. This is caused by the flat front of the bullet pushing the water ahead at extreme speeds. These pressure waves usually push the bullet one way or another. If there was something with a sharp point leading the way, the bullet might travel straighter. That’s why dart guns are usually much more effective underwater.
The Bullish issue isn’t whether such a device exists, it’s whether or not you could use such a device to kill someone on the boat with a shot from underwater. That’s where I Call Bull. This is a matter of optics. Let’s assume the stabilizer exists and it does exactly what it is supposed to do. You could easily shoot someone else who was also underwater, but when you tried to shoot someone above the surface you’d miss my a mile. The refraction of light at the surface of the water could make the victim appear to be as much as 10 feet from where she actually was. Next time you are swimming, go underwater and try to look at someone at the pools edge. You’ll see what I mean. This woman was a good twenty feet above the water. There would be no way for a shooter (without some pretty complex compensation computers) to calculate the actual position of the victim and hit her perfectly with one shot.
