One of the rules of safe gun handling is knowing your target and what’s beyond it. Limiting penetrating power is one of the reasons that self-defense ammo is normally a hollow point. You really don’t want your bullet going through the bad guy and into the next apartment.

So how far can a bullet travel? It turns out that in a test performed under optimum conditions and fired at a 40 degree up angle a 9mm bullet traveled 2405 yards. That’s a long way, 24 football fields.

In the real world.

I think that normally we are firing handguns at shoulder height and in a nearly level angle. This will greatly reduce the distance that bullet will travel although by one estimate that I found that could still be 300 yards. One ballistic table showed a 115 grain 9mm bullet drops 43 inches in 214 yards. Even the warning printed on the side of the box that 22 Long rifle bullets come in states they are dangerous up to 1 mile.

In the real world, it would be rare ( depending on where you are) for a shot to travel 300 yards without striking something. But This is why we must know what is behind our target if we miss, the first thing inline with that shot out to 300 yards could be hit.

Accuracy

Now that does not mean that you as a shooter have the ability to hit a target at 300 yards with your pistol. The U.S. army 9mm pistol manual list the effective useful range of the 9mm pistol as 50 meters. But the Army doesn’t consider the 9mm sidearm to be the main battle weapon. However Professional shooter Jerry Miculek has a video of himself making a 1000 yard shot with a 9mm handgun on a steel gong target. He hit it on the second shot. That’s amazing!

The vast majority of self-defense encounters will be between 3 and 10 yards. This is why most self-defense drills are done at 10 yards or less. Feel free to occasionally run your targets out to 25 or 50 yards if your range has space. It is fun and challenging to shoot at those distances. But in the real world if your adversary is 25 yards away it may be best just to get out of there if possible before it turns into an armed encounter.

Every bullet fired goes somewhere they don’t just vaporize. Re-watch your favorite action movie and during the gunfight scenes just try to imagine where all of those rounds that missed their intended target might have ended up.

Related questions.

Will a bullet go through a wall?

Will the bullet go through a wall? That depends on a couple of things. What caliber is the bullet and what is the wall made of? I was reading a book on self-defense last night. The author threw in a chapter on handguns. In that chapter, he states that most handgun bullets are stopped by light material surfaces such as walls and car bodies. WHAT! This guys research must com from action movies.

Unlike the movies, I have seen many bullets zing through a car door like butter and even the lowly 22 long rifle has no trouble going through a sheetrocked wall if it doesn’t hit a stud.
In one test a 124 grain 9mm bullet penetrated 10 inches of wallboard stacked back to back. In fairness, I will admit his book was on unarmed self-defense (he should really stick to his strengths).

Back to our wall stopping bullets. A brick or stone wall will stop most handgun rounds but both of these materials tend to shatter when struck so repeated rounds in the same spot on the wall may allow one to pass through it. Bare concrete blocks will also shatter when struck.

A wooden wall would depend on how thick the interior face, the outside sheathing, and the siding are. Full metal jacket bullets would be far more likely to go through than a hollow point bullet due to the hollow point expanding and loss of energy.

Will a handgun bullet go through a metal door?

The average metal door is actually a hollow shell filled in most cases with insulation. It will not stop a handgun bullet but it will cause a hollow point bullet to expand and lose a lot of speed and expend much of its energy. A full metal jacket would be less affected by the door. The same effect would be expected from a heavy wooden exterior door. So if there is an enraged person with any gun on the other side of your door don’t stand at the door looking out the peephole.

Will a car protect you from a bullet?

As I mentioned above the sheet metal of a car body will not stop a bullet. If you find yourself in need of cover, say in a parking lot, a car is not great cover but it is good for concealment meaning you can hide behind a car body and stay out of sight. But a bullet can penetrate it. The very best cover from a car or truck would be positioning yourself with the engine block between you and the shooter. The heavy metal engine block can stop all but the largest caliber.

Is firing a handgun into the air dangerous?

We have all seen the celebratory gunfire on the news where happy people are firing their guns into the air. This begs the question are those bullets dangerous when they come back down. The bullets leave the barrel of the gun at high speed but slow down as they gain altitude at some point the can no longer climb and begin to fall back to earth. They will fall at terminal velocity that is much slower than the muzzle velocity they had when fired. these falling bullets can and do injure people if they are hit by them. There have also been fatalities reported although rare. All in all, it is not a good idea to fire guns into the air.