Question

When a bullet is fired it exerts an equal and opposite force on the gun yet hurt caused by recoil of the gun is much less than that by bullet.why?

Answer 1

Because of the following few reasons:

• Bullet is made up of much harder material than the gun arm rest.
• The bullet being of smaller are exerts more force on a very small are on the body, so it exerts very high pressure on the body whereas a gun has larger surface area in contact with the body so force gets distributed over a larger surface area so the effective pressure exerted by the gun is comparatively lesser.