Guy bleeds from forehead after firing .38+p snubby first time. Recoil or Richochet?

P

Para Bellum

New member
title says all. Me and some buddies saw a guy at the range who shot a .38+p snubby for the first time. Before that he had fired some shots with a 9x19mm Glock quite well. Then he tried the snubby.

After his first shot with the snubby he stopped and started bleeding from his forehead. It turned out he suffered an approx 5mm cut on his forehead underneath the wolly hat which he wore.

None of us - even he himself - could tell wether
(1) he had held the snubby so weakly that he hit his own forhead with the snubby due to the snubbys recoil (.38+p?)? :confused: or
(2) his or some other bullet ricoched off a backstop etc and hit him on the forehead. :confused:

At the time he fired his .38+p snubby only a 9x19mm Glock was fired which also could have produced a richochet...

We still don't know how this happened and haven't seen anything alike before in decades.

- Is it at all likely, that somebody holds a .38s+P snubby so badly that it kicks his own forehead and makes it bleed?

- Is it at all likely that a bullet(fragment) richochet can hit somebody at a proper range so hard that it produces a 5mm cut trough a wolly hat? And then no fragement is found in the wolly hat or around the guy who got hurt?
 
- Is it at all likely, that somebody holds a .38s+P snubby so badly that it kicks his own forehead and makes it bleed?
Click to expand...

I guess it's possible if he was holding the gun too close to his face as though aiming a rifle or something of that sort. Must have been some recoil. I don't like to shoot +Ps in snub nose guns anyway, regular .38s have enough of a kick, but certainly not that kind of kick.


- Is it at all likely that a bullet(fragment) richochet can hit somebody at a proper range so hard that it produces a 5mm cut trough a wolly hat? And then no fragement is found in the wolly hat or around the guy who got hurt?
Click to expand...

Very possible. Happens to a friend of mine just about every time we go to the range. Every time we go, until recently, seems like he always gets hit once or twice by some fragment. It's never left him bleeding or anything, but it sure hurts him and leaves a bad bruise or rash.
 
Tell your friend to get an X-ray just in case. I recently saw a young lady who was firing a pistol on a range and noticed a 'knock' on her index finger, weapon hand. It bled slightly and she thought nothing of it, just thought it was a recoil injury. A few days later her finger was still sore and I X-rayed it and there was a piece of lead inside, a few centimetres away from the skin breach. There were little specks of lead leading up to the main fragment, enabling me to prove that the direction of travel of the fragment was from the targets towards the shooter.
So it does happen. If the piece of lead is sizeable they will want to remove it to reduce the risk of plumbism.
 
a .38 isn't held close to the face....

...so I can't imagine him having hit himself in the head with his gun!!! I wonder if he got zinged by somebody's flying brass...

Hope he went to the doctor to get x-rays and get it checked. That's not a huge wound, but at a gun range, any unexplained injury like that deserves a visit to the ER IMO.

I got zinged pretty good in the side of the head today by somebody's brass from THREE stations down to my left!!!! DK what the guy was shooting; looked like maybe a Ruger. But that thing was shooting the brass out with some amazing speed. I thought *I* had been shot for a second!

Springmom
 
Lead splash is a very real possibility. I qualified next to a fella a few years back that was using an older Smith Airweight. Every time he fired, I felt a prickling sensation on the side of my face. I finally put my hand up to scratch the itch, and my hand came away bloody. Needless to say, the range officer freaked :eek: . Timing was off on the airweight and it was shaving lead at the forcing cone. Thank God for shooting glasses!
 
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