it might be a good idea to wear a helmet & faceshield ? especially at a public range, if you do lots of steel plate shooting.

Years ago I was shooting a 1911.  Some one at the club got the brillant idea to use conveyor belting as a backstop at the pistol range. Well, the pistol rests were chained to the bench.  I was shooting lead semi-wadcutters at 25yrds. Every once and a while after I would shoot a round, the chain, which was dangling under the bench would jump and rattle around.  I was the only one on the range at the time.  I finally figured out when I saw a semi-wadcutter laying under the bench that the bullets were bouncing off the backstop and hitting the chain.  Weird.  I was using a low velocity target load and the bullets didn't have enough power to penetrate the conveyor belt.  Needless to say the backstops got changed.
Which also brings up the time I was deer hunting.  I was shooting a Win. Mod. 70 in .338 WM.  I had loaded it down to .33 Win velocities. I hit the deer in the lungs and dropped it.  It wasn't until we got the deer back to camp and examined it that I found 2 bullet holes on the same side about 8" apart.  The bullet had gone in and scrambled the lungs, hit a rib on the far side, turned around, and went through the liver on the way out the same side it went in.  I almost shot a deer and myself at the same time that day.  Bullets can do some really strange things at times.

Went to the range with this Afghani guy.. Self-proclaimed weapons expert.  Spent the whole ride to the range telling me how many weapons he and his family owned "back home", and how much he knew about shooting.

Put him behind a bushmaster 20" on a 25 yard indoor range, firing frangibles.  That motherfucker pounded six out of ten rounds into the target carrier and sprayed everything in existance with little bits of shattered ceramic crap.  The only holes he put into a sillouette target at that range were from fragments spraying downward.

I shoot a 10mm it seems to keep going forward and not come back.


Indoor ranges suck.

Quoted: At a shoot a couple years ago, the penetrator from a .50 AP round bounced back from a piece of steel 400 yards downrange and shattered the window of an RV, stopping mere inches from terminating the life of a full half gallon of Jack Daniels...

I hope you gave the window a hero's funeral for throwing itself in the path of the bullet.

I was shooting in the mountains against a huge backstop (50' vertical) that sloped gently upwards. The .45ACP entered the dirt, skipped out of it and hit a pine tree, and came back and hit me in the collar bone. Freaky. I had to stop and think about that for a while.

I've always shot rifles in the same place. Higher velocity rounds go in the dirt and stay there. The slow-moving .45 didn't have enough energy to bury itself.

I've been hit by fragments before at the indoor range.

I've also found .45acp bullets in the dirt where they impacted due to a low POI in a new set of sights.

Bullets do weird shit.

I was hit in the nose by a bullet fragment at an indoor range. It left a little scratch, and was probably just a tiny piece. I wear eye protection, and will continue to do so.

Shooting glasses are cheap compared to new eyeballs.

I work at a indoor range. It's fairly common for a few rounds to come back. Most times the bullet trap needs to be raked out due to "hot spots" forming. Sometimes it's ammo related. We have a list of ammos that can not be shot on our range since the metals being used in those brands tend to bounce back off the steel skid plates. Wolf ammo can not be used on our range for that reason. One of our main rules is, if a magnet sticks to it, you can't shoot it.

Shooting IPSDC indoors at the old indoor range that was in Lincoln I would get hit multiple times a night  mostly jackets but the occasional  good sized peice of lead
peice of lead


Saw a guy get cold cocked at a bowling pin shoot years ago
he hit the edge of the table and a .45 slug came back and hit hime between the eyes dropped him like a rock , he did wake up about 2 minutes later  

Quoted: Bullets do weird shit.

A common theme here is if you shoot something hard, the bullet may bounce back.  Had a .25cal bullet fly right past my face once.  Always, always wear eye protection!

I was probably 15 years old and was sitting on the hood of a bronco shooting a .22 at a piece of iron on a phonepole. Yes I am aware of how dumb it was. It made this cool richochet sound and I foolishly didn't know or care where the bullets were going.

One of the richochets hit me in the thigh. It did not break the skin or penetrate the blue jeams, but it left a welt the size of a goose egg. I didn't do that silly shit any more.