Ahhhh, a day at the range. Sunny, upper 60's here in NY, a cute girl in a tight sweater at the shooting point next to us, plenty of ammo, my AR and Wave's LEGP. What made it better was the range officer, who could care less about the stupid one-shot-every-five-seconds rule was running the pit today. It was bound to be a great day.
We were shooting at paint can lids at the 100 meter points. Ray was at the point to my right and I was doing my best to shower him with hot brass. That's because I'm a lefty and that's what we do best.
Sidebar...Mind you now, that Ray is spending his time in lower Manhattan, where he could be gassed, blown to bits, crushed by some truck driving or crane operating fool in the course of his everyday duties so what place could be safer than at the range with your friends? Hmmm?
We're shooting, loading, shooting, loading.. Chatting with a guy next to us who says he runs nothing but Wolf .223 through his PWA without so much as a hiccup since he's started buying Wold ammo.
Sidebar.... Literally, not two minutes after he tells us this his gun does a %100 string of FTEs. We pull apart his bolt carrier and sure as shit, the extractor is ground to nothing (I'm guessing the 500 rounds of steel cased ammo he put through it last weekend may have had something to do with it.) And he'd only run 30 rounds through the gun today and his gun was DIRTY as sin. I've never seen a firing pin so BLACK after so few rounds.
Anyways, we're popping away, and I hear a funny sounding BANG! (not a normal sounding one) and then a hearty HOLY SHIT! I quickly glance to my right and Ray is rubbing his face with one hand and holding an LEGP in the other with the mag spring and rounds falling out of the mag body.
I quickly race (okay, it was only one step) over and make sure the LEGP is OK. Hey! It's a low numbered one and I just wanted to make sure it wasn't damaged. Then I look at Ray. Not too long though, he's funny looking and I didn't want to stare. But I checked to see that he still had two eyes, a mouth and no extra nostrils. Aside from some debris specks on his face and glasses he was still just as funny looking as he was when he got to the range.
We look down and around, can't find the mag's floor plate, but we do find the offending piece of brass. It had split and ruptured from the midpoint of the case body straight down to the primer.
I'm not normally one to name companies but in this case I will because this shouldn't happen to anyone. (And if I name the wrong company upon Ray's perusal on this I WILL edit it.) This brass was Lake City and was from a lot of mixed head stamped dent/dinged ammo Ray had gotten from Southern Ammo.(if that's the right name?) It came loose, in an ammobox and Ray spent many hours lovingly loading it into magazines. I had run several mags worth of this through my weapon with no problems.
Ray's OK, but watch your ass(and face) and think twice when thinking of putting some cheap stuff through your gun!
Stay safe!
Sherm