Another time I was there I decided to shoot my CZ52 through a rifle muffler.
czc3513: I did something like that as a teenager. Actually, I'd decided to make my own rifle silencer out of a 2-liter pop bottle.
It actually looked pretty stupid, and was impractical since it completely obscured the sight line. Oh, and it didn't work either (in fact, it had the
opposite effect
). Anyway, I only had a .22LR and a .30-06 Mauser at the time, so I decided to test it out on the .30-06 (since the .22 isn't very loud anyway). Without hearing protection, of course. Let's just say the shockwave was so strong I think I felt it as much as I heard it.
As for range incidents, one time (again, as a teenager) I was shooting .22 rifles with a friend on his parent's property. I had just finished loading his rifle for him and handed it to him. He immediately shouldered it, pulled the trigger, and...nothing. "Is it loaded?!" "Yeah," I said, "but I think the safety is on." He fiddled with his rifle for a minute and then says, "I don't think that's the problem." "Yes it is," I replied, "I remember putting the safety on." "No it's NOT!"--and then he clicks the safety off and starts jiggling the trigger from the hip to show me that the safety wasn't what had prevented the rifle from firing. Jiggle, Jiggle, Jiggle, BANG! Fortunately, he was trained well enough that he knew to keep the rifle pointed down range the whole time, and when it did "accidentally" go off the round went harmlessly towards the target. Moral of the story? Good safety training can overcome a lot of stupidity from distraction or immaturity.
Besides that, there was one incident recently on my own parent's land where a hunter and his daughter were on our property without our knowledge and inadvertantly found themselves ducking a barrage of .40 cal. and 7.62mm rounds (no one was injured, thank God!). The idiot actually had permission to hunt on our property, provided that he let us know he was out there (usually by parking his truck in our driveway). However, this day (and probably other days when we didn't catch him) he decided to "sneak" in onto our land from the side, probably so that he could hunt after dusk without anyone knowing. Funny thing was that he fired
two shots as a distress signal (hunter education course teaches that
three shots is a distress signal), and then had the nerve to yell and cuss at us later for continuing to fire. I sure hope that potential moonlight poaching was worth putting his life and that of his daughter at risk.
-Charles