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Old October 13, 2017, 10:46 AM   #51
pax
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Excellent point!

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Old October 13, 2017, 07:45 PM   #52
JohnKSa
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I'd be interested in how he lost an entire 22lr in the action.
I have personally witnessed a tubular magazine in a .22rimfire retain a round while the action was worked once, then give it up the second time it was operated. When the springs get weak, bad things can happen. This is why it's critical to actually check for rounds, not to just run the action until no more rounds come out and then assume it must be empty.
Quote:
One of the things that deeply surprised me were how many NDs I found with people dry firing revolvers.
I know of one ND with a revolver where the operator opened the cylinder fully and dumped the rounds out of the cylinder using gravity as the "ejector". The cylinder was closed and dryfire began. The gun clicked a few times and then fired.

One round had stuck in its chamber and didn't fall out. And the shooter didn't check carefully enough to detect it. No one was hurt, but furniture had to be replaced and the shooter's hearing was permanently damaged.
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Old October 14, 2017, 05:52 PM   #53
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Tailgator's point goes double for those of us who do any of our own gunsmithing. We take guns apart and put them together so many times to check fit that it is easy to get a little too comfortable with it and have a momentary attention lapse. Familiarity breeds contempt, and that goes double for those of us constantly tweaking things.

I've had three unintended discharges over the last six decades of shooting, though I would call them only partially negligent, as in all cases the gun was pointed down-range on a hot range when they occurred. Two were due to mechanical failures, one being my fault (was still learning 1911 trigger work back then and it was my first one), one actually the fault of an aftermarket part on a rifle trigger not engaging adequately, and one was pure brain gas in which I got out of sequence with a 1911 while contemplating something or other about the target (inattention).

The mechanical rifle failure was a case of the rifle discharging upon closing of the bolt. I was closing it with my trigger finger hand, so no finger had an opportunity to be anywhere near the trigger. It is another example of why you want not only a solid backstop when handling a gun, but hearing and eye protection on if you have to cycle live ammo through it to test feeding.

The two 1911 incidents happened before I went to Gunsite and learned the four rules. There have been none since. I follow all the redundancies to keep it that way, knowing all the while that sooner or later I'll absent-mindedly omit one, but that the others will then prevent tragedy. I can't trust doing anything less, based on my past experience.

Jeff Cooper was even harder on us about the dry firing setup than some mentions in this thread have been. He insisted we not only have the ammo in a separate room, but in a locked container or drawer in that room. His emphasis on safety redundancy shows there. I think there is a psychological factor as well, in that it is good to associate the acts of locking and unlocking with safe-to-dry-fire and unsafe-to-dry fire, respectively. It helps avoid the chance of some of the sequential thinking failures Pax described.
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