Someone told me heavy guns recoil less not because of gravity but something else? Explain in laymens? Please?

Question

When I fire 00-Buckshot out of my buddies extremely light 3 pound break-barrel shotgun it slams into my shoulder with a vengeance, yet when I fire the exact same cartridge out of my 10 pound full length pump action shotgun, it barely kicks harder then my rifles. I always assumed this was because the gun weighed more so gravity was pulling at the gun with more mass therefore pulling at some of the recoil. When I explained this, someone told me to "read a ******* basic physics book you dumb ***." Not a nice thing to say, but what am I missing? I understand some physics terms, but try to keep it in laymans wording. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The heavy gun recoils less simply because it has more inertia. Inertia is the tendency of an object to remain at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force. You may associate this phenomenon with gravity because a massive object (thus heavier) has more inertia compared to a light object.



When a gun fires, the exploding gunpowder pushes on the gun and bullet with an equal force, according to Newton's third law of motion. Assuming that the exploding gunpowder in both light and heavy guns produce roughly the same force, the heavier gun will recoil less because it resists motion due to its larger inertia.



A mathematical explaination will be using the principle of conservation of momentum, as explained in the other answers above.

Answer 2

Whenever you fire a gun, the bullet leaving the barrel has a certain velocity. The basic idea is, when the bullet gets blown out the barrel, it has to push against something, and that thing is the gun. Of course, the gun gets pushed against something, that something being your shoulder.



The nice thing about this is that the shoulder-slam-power is related to the *mass* of the gun. As you noticed, the heavier gun hurts less, and this is because the bullet pushing back against a light gun will move it more than a bullet pushing against a heavier gun. This rule of physics is summed up as "Masses like to do whatever they were doing before, the more mass the more they want to keep doing it." So, in the case of the heavier gun (with more mass), it would like to stand still more than the lighter (less mass) gun.



This is also why, if you throw a tennis ball straight at a wall at some velocity, it won't make a dent, but if you throw a bowling ball at the same velocity it will leave a hole. Since it's straight, it's not really gravity that makes the difference.

Answer 3

the relevant physics you should be reading about is called the conservation of momentum...



this means that in any collision (in this case, the collision of the firing mechanism of the rifle with the bullet), the total amount of what we call momentum is the same before and after the collision



this is one of the foundations of all physics understanding...



so, what is momentum...it is the massxvelocity of an object



what is the momentum of the bullet before it is fired...zero...and, the conservation of momentum tells you that the total momentum will stay zero AFTER collision...



ok, how can this be? the bullet will come out a high (very high) speeds, and so it will carry lots of momentum with it...



true, but the "kickback" of the rifle carries momentum in the opposite direction, and...it turns out the rifle has exactly the same momentum backward as the bullet does forward, so the total amount adds to zero



this gets us to what determines the "kick" in the kickback...let's say the bullet travels off with a speed v and a small mass m, its momentum is mv



the rifle kicks back with the same momentum, and let's call its speed V and its mass M



we have that MV=mv or, with a little division



V=mv/M



we see that the bigger we make the mass of the rifle, the smaller the speed it has in kicking back...and this is what you are experiencing...a real life version of conservation of momentum



it has to do with the mass of the gun, not the pull of gravity on the gun

Answer 4

The answer is not because of gravity, but because of conservation of momentum.



Momentum (p) is the product of mass (m) and velocity (v):



p = mv



Before firing, both the gun and the projectile have a velocity of zero, therefore the total momentum of the system is also zero.



After firing, the total momentum of the gun-bullet system must remain zero. Thus, the forward momentum of the bullet must be balanced by the backwards momentum of the gun. (m1 = mass of bullet, v1 = velocity of bullet, m2 = mass of gun, v2 = kickback velocity of gun.):



p = m1 v1 + m2 v2 = 0

m1 v1 = -m2 v2

v2 = - m1 v1 / m2



You should see that if the bullet is the same mass and fires with the same velocity from both guns, the heavier gun (larger m2) will have a lower kickback velocity.

Answer 5

they're heavier weights reduce their momentums causing less recoil. simple