Ever seen a gun being shot? I mean literally?

Posted in AR-15, Pistols, Rifles by with 23 Comments
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“PooFire” was using his car as a barrier to practice shooting over (NOT a good idea) with his AR-15 but forgot his revolver was placed on the car roof. His S&W Model 442 Airweight took a 5.56mm bullet to the chamber.

Click to expand the images.

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Stupid-1

He knows what he did was idiotic, and as someone at AR15.com said, he has balls of steel posting it on the internet. So don’t mock him for it!

Thanks to Jay for the link.

Steve Johnson

Founder and Dictator-In-Chief of TFB. A passionate gun owner, a shooting enthusiast and totally tacti-uncool. Favorite first date location: any gun range. Steve can be contacted here.

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  • Simon_The_Brit

    He forgot the 7 P’s rule; Prior Preparation & Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance

    On the plus side, bet he doesn’t do that again, so a good lesson learned.

  • michael

    Nasty. He will know for next time.

  • Avtomat

    That’ll buff right out

  • Valhalla

    How much does one of those things cost?

  • Matt Groom

    I had a friend from South Dakota. He got a new truck with his USMC bonus. A Red Dodge Ram, as I recall. One day, he decided to go prairie dog hunting, and he used to shoot off of the roll bar on his old truck. His new truck didn’t have one, so he shot off of the roof of the cab, being sure to put down a blanket so he didn’t scratch the paint. The muzzle blast from his .22-250 burned the paint in front of the muzzle, and peeled away the rubber seals around the top of the windshield, causing the truck to leak every time it rains or snows. He had to drive nearly 150 miles to get it fixed, and it cost him $250 plus gas in a truck that gets 12 MPG. But at least he didn’t shoot another gun!

    Shooting off of your car is a bad idea.

  • http://evylrobot.com/ Michael

    Let he who has never learned an expensive lesson cast the first stone!

  • Phil Wong

    Actually, that reminds me of the “Mythbusters” episode where they re-created an incident in which a suspect’s Colt revolver was actually struck by police gunfire in such a manner that the officer’s bullet actually lodged inside one of the chamber mouths, blocking the cylinder’s rotation and disabling the gun.

    At first glance, it appears that the damage is confined to the cylinder and not the frame, so it should be fix-able with a new cylinder – Smith & Wesson could handle it easily, and the story/pics alone might get him a discount on the gunsmithing work…

  • sean

    Is it just the cylinder that is damaged? Or is the frame bent? He can get a new cylinder.

    I haven’t had any expensive mistakes, but I may be lucky.

  • http://www.australianhunting.net Sierra

    I saw a .243 Win fired at a donkey over a vehicle roof once by a mate who was using a down pillow as a rest. He failed to notice the pillow had pushed up in front of the muzzle. You have never seen so many feathers.

    Another guy told me he had torn a strip right across the top of his vehicle’s roof while fox shooting with a .308 Win. Muzzle awareness isn’t really that hard is it?

  • Dom

    LOL @ Avtomat! I love that expression.

    I too was reminded of the Mythbusters episode. The cylinder basically caught the bullet, with some bent parts but everything was whole. However, that was 9mm Glock vs a .38; this goes to show that long guns are a whole ‘nother category!

  • HK_USP_45

    So, R. Kelly video’d himself with underage girls. So should we say he had “balls of steel” for taping the illegal act, or just call him an idiot for it?

    I’m sure he’s learned a valuable lesson, and I do commend him for sharing it with us, so others won’t make the same mistake.

    However, I don’t buy into the “let those who haven’t made mistakes cast the first stone” mentality when it comes to firearms. Because mistakes and idiocy with firearms can mean your death, a loved ones death, or a teammate. Yes I have done stupid things with firearms, but yes I’ll man up and call myself an idiot for doing those things.

  • vinnie

    Am I the only one who is concerned that the muzzle of the pistol was pointed at the shooter?

  • Dom

    @vinnie – That thought crossed my mind. But, guns that are not in someone’s hands very rarely go off, nowadays. Also, passive safeties on revolvers are pretty good. This being so modern, I am sure there is nothing that could have come of this to cause the firing pin to strike the primer. Possibly he could have crushed a round with the rifle bullet, but I think such a detonation would have been more of a grenade effect anyhow and the orientation of the muzzle would not have mattered.

    In fact, if he had shot the pistol from the rear, and say, smashed the hammer right into the firing pin, it could have fired and injured a bystander at some unpredictable direction. Odds are against that, but it could have been much worse.

  • Mainsail

    I’m thinking he is lucky he doesnt have a nice shot through the middle of his roof. The revolver is only an inch or less thick, so it wouldn’t take much to do.

  • Matt Groom

    At least now he can get a S&W 442 without the internal lock. S&W has decided to make a few 642 and 442s for a certain distributor (I don’t know which) without that hated internal lock.

  • Matt Groom
  • Mike

    Friend running a rifle course with HK91:

    Mag dry, pulled it out and threw it onto the small berm in front. Reloaded – next shot everyone saw something go flying up and forward.

    He shot his empty mag – 7.62 bullet really opened up that aluminum mag. And this was 25+ years ago when HK mags were not cheap like they are now.

  • Bolter

    Actually the guy has balls of steel for admitting he drives a Ford Probe! -grin-

    Bolter

    • http://www.thefirearmblog.com Steve

      Bolter, lol, he did say he did not care if the car got shot in the process of training ;)

  • J.A. James

    I was cruising for southwest Idaho shooting spots a week or so ago when I met a gentleman who retired from the USMC after combined active duty, reserve and civilian service of almost 50 years. He retired as a W4 (Chief Warrant Officer-4) and served as a Battalion Gunner as well as Regimental and Division senior instructional positions.

    He asked me to call him either Gunner or Gunny and I’m very pleased to have been invited to that degree of familiarity with this man. Anyway, after we shot of some of our own rounds and a bunch of rounds from other folks with range toys, Gunner and I got to talking about all of the double-dumbass moments we’d seen.

    He freely admitted to me that he put a 5.56 round through the roof of a USMC Brigadier General’s staff car. The General was probably a good officer because he’d stripped off his stars and was taking a middle-journeyman level shooting course at Gunsite with a bunch of his enlisted Marines. Anyway… One of the courses called for deploying out the uprange side of the vehicle and once the vehicle was clear, firing up the targets downrange. Since it was a course of fire simulating evacuating a disabled vehicle while engaging the targets, everybody was moving away from the vehicle as fast as they could safely move and keep the targets fired up.

    Gunner has probably fired more rounds than most of us have even seen and even he had a brain fart and forgot the boreline/sightline distance on his rifle.
    He popped a 5.56 NATO round into the roof just above the driver’s door. The roof was covered with a Nomex mat to keep muzzle blast from destroying the finish…the mat didn’t do much for the round at a range of something like two meters.

    To add to my admiration of the good General, as I understand it he only asked Gunner for a round of drinks for the Marines, a bottle of good Scotch for himself and for permission to rib the good Gunner about the fup-duck for the rest of their natural lives.

    This was a brainfart on the part of a gentleman who’s trained high end, high tier special operations forces for long enough that some of the countries he worked don’t even exist any longer. I can’t even give you a decent guess as to the number of rounds fired in training and the real world on the part of one of the USMC Fleet Antiterrorist Support Teams. I’m guessing it’s somewhere between a buttload and a kilobuttload per weapon, per shooter.

    The guy in this article followed the rules. That’s what the Holy Tetralogy of shooting safety rules are all about.

    1. Don’t point the muzzle at anything you can’t afford to destroy.
    2. It’s ALWAYS loaded.
    3. Be sure your bullet will stop before it gets to anything that violates Rule 1.
    4. Keep your finger off the trigger until your muzzle is pointed somewhere that ensures you won’t violate Rule 1 or Rule 3.

    It’s embarrassing as hell to replace the revolver but he can afford it.
    Proof positive the gun was loaded because it shot the revolver.
    The round went downrange and stopped long before it broke Rule 1.
    The trigger wasn’t operated until Rules 1 and 3 were in full compliance.

    Personally, I think if it were me, I’d get the revolver hard chromed and clear coated just the way it is and it would go into my range bag to be used during every shooter education session I was part of for the rest of my life. Some examples just cut through the student’s preconceptions without having to say a word. This is a very good example of that.

    • http://www.thefirearmblog.com Steve

      J.A., haha, great story, thanks for sharing it with us :)

  • http://dagnabbitstudio.org Chriso

    Just a dumb story from last summer:
    A buddy of mine was firing his dad’s WW2 bringback (an Ortgies .32) that he had sold me. He had never fired a semi automatic before, and crossed his thumbs. The sear carved a nice groove in his thumb. Sadly this also tophatted the spent shell. He’s bleeding like a stuck pig, and can’t grip the slide to clear it and make the gun safe because it is too slippery with blood. I can’t help due to my hands looking like q-tips from the previous day’s attempt at burning them off. We finally secure the arm and walk back to the cars. He looks for a towel to wipe the gun off. I tell him ‘nah, leave it. You never know when someone else’s DNA on your gun will come in handy’ At least we had a nice back stop.

    • http://www.thefirearmblog.com Steve

      “You never know when someone else’s DNA on your gun will come in handy”

      HAHAHA, good one.