Ricochet

May 13, 2008

I’ve been meaning to post this since Thursday night, but I’ve been extremely busy with, well, everything else. 

My buddy and I went out to the club to shoot pistols like we usually do every week.  Everything was going fine.  We had finished all of our tactical drills (drawing, reloading, low light, etc…), and were just wrapping up with the last few mags of ammo when something very weird happened. 

While he was shooting his .45, I noticed something hit me in the side.  It stung a little bit, but it wasn’t too bad.  I knew it wasn’t the shell casing, but I didn’t think anything of it anyway. I should have.

He wanted to shoot my subcompact XD-9, and I wanted to shoot his Springfield 1911, so we traded. I watched him fire the first shot from my 9mm. I saw the hole appear in the paper target and then something weird happened. I saw the paper swing out away from the backstop, and noticed a rip appear along the edge. Right after he pulled the trigger, he bent over and yelled “what the hell was that?”.

I knew he was hurt somehow. I immediately looked at the gun and saw that it was intact, so that wasn’t the problem. He cleared the weapon and set it on the bench. When he lifted his shirt, he had a spot on his stomach that was bleeding, and two welts under his arm. I checked out the spot on his stomach to make sure there wasn’t anything in it, and there wasn’t. Luckily, a chunck of lead got stuck in his shirt.

We aren’t exactly sure why the shots were ricocheting. We looked at the backstop, and noticed that the lead is fairly high in the bottom of it. I figure the bullet hit the armor plating (which angels down), hit the lead (which needs to be removed) and bounced back. I checked the few clean targets that I had hanging and saw small rips in them, most likely from other ricochets.

Overall this was a scary event. When he yelled after firing a shot, I didn’t know how bad it was. Needless to say, we packed up and left. We also alerted the board memebers, and plan to clean the lead out very soon.

Filed under: At the Range |