Stupid Gun Stuff

I pride myself on being fairly safe with firearms. Every once in awhile, I have to be reminded of basic safety things.

One thing that was drilled into my head as a kid was not to shoot rocks. Bad idea. They cause ricochets. Ricochets are a bad thing. I forgot this little lesson, and paid the price.

Easter Sunday, my brother-in-law and I decide we are going to shoot a bit. I had a box of .45's for the occasion, and we set down to doing some shooting. Targets usually aren't a problem, and normally I'll shoot cactus leaves. They make great targets, and you can see a hit immediately.

At any rate, there were a few sacks of concrete laying about, that had gotten wet. Which means they are actually concrete, and not sand anymore. My brother-in-law, who is about as good a gun person as I've ever seen, decided to shoot at a bag of this stuff.

So we did. The USP handled about as well as any pistol could ask. We were making hits from about 40 yards out, pretty much in the center mass.

I had run through about five rounds, when I suddenly felt an extremely hard blow on the left side of my nose. I thought somebody had snuck around to my left side and punched me in the head. My eye teared up. My hand came away wet with blood. I couldn't figure out what had happened. It actually drove me to my knees.

My mind was trying piece this thing together. I was running the whole thing back through my head, trying to make sense of it. It's hard to do after a blow to the head. I remembered hearing something hit the ground next to me. I looked, and a huge chunk of lead was laying there.

That's when it clicked. I had been hit upside the head by a ricochet. The bag was sitting at around a 45 degree angle. The slug hit the concrete, traveled up the bag into the air with most of its velocity spent. The angle was enough to lob it back towards us, and it had hit me as it fell back to earth. The proof was right next to me. I picked the smashed slug up and staggered back into the house.

An inch more and to the left would have put the slug into my eye. It wasn't traveling fast enough to kill me, but it was darn sure fast enough and big enough to have knocked my eye out.

And it hurt. It hit me as hard as a punch, and cut my nose pretty well. It was sore for a week, and the cut took awhile to heal.

So don't shoot rocks or concrete. Ever. You'd have thought I was smart enough not to go along with something like this.

The next mistake came a few rounds later. We had a case of Wolf ammunition. Another bad idea. Basically, a round was overcharged and blew up the cartridge. This completely ended shooting for the day.

I'm happy to report the gun suffered no permanent damage from the event, says the gunsmith. Wolf ammunition is a bad idea, period. If the steel casing doesn't split under pressure, the gunk they pack the bullets in will gum up your barrel, or won't eject properly.

Factory ammunition by a reputable manufacturer is about the only thing I'm ever going to put through a gun again.

The lessons: don't shoot rocks or concrete. Second, use decent factory ammunition. Third, wear shooting glasses. Had that round hit just a bit higher, I'd join the ranks of the disfigured and handicapped. Glasses would have probably saved my eye.

Learn from my stupidity, shooters. I certainly did.