Hang fire safety

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showmebob

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I was taught for years that if a gun goes click instead of bang to keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction for 30 seconds because you may have a hang fire, then eject the round.
My question is since instructors teach to immediately eject and chamber a new round is there any danger? Or, do hangfires just not happen with modern ammo? Or, are we just playing the odds?
Has anyone ever experienced a hang fire?
 
Unless you are in a gunfight what does it hurt to wait a bit? However if you are training, rather than target shooting, train like you fight. Tap, rack and pull.
 
I have had a few clicks with no bangs with a .22, not with larger calibers. Interesting question. I guess it depends on what type of shooting you are practicing. If just shooting, then maybe wait a while before ejecting the offending round.

For self defense, you are talking about a type 1 malfunction. Either you got a dud or you did not chamber a round. Rack the slide and go. You don't want to pause if you ever have to pull your gun. How you train is how you will react.
 
Seems to happen with rimfire ammo more than anything else. One of the reason many say don't use anything rimfire for defense.

Some old surplus is really bad about doing it.
Had some old 7.62x54r that for a batch it fired like this
click 1,2,3,4 bang
cycle bolt
click 1,2, bang
cycle bolt
click 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 bang


Be safe.
 
I take the hang fire issue seriously, my grand father was killed by a hang fire .22 back in the early 1970's while squirrel hunting. He ejected the round and it blew up in his face, he died in the hospital 3 days later, of course his imune system was comprimised as he had cancer and was on chemo.

I had several cases of OLD 38 special police training wadcutter ammo that was given to my step father by the local sheriff years ago and I inherited (almost all gone now, although I did shoot a few rounds of it today) that was loaded by prisoners back in the 1980's (maybe 1970's) lots of variation in that stuff, every few hundred rounds there will be a HOT load and also every few hundred rounds will have a hang / misfire (I only shoot it out of good .357 revovlers due to the occasional hot load). I have had a couple of the hang fires go off after 3-5 seconds.
 
I always play it safe but had an instructor ask me why I was waiting to do the tap/rack. I would think things could get ugly if a hangfire happened while racking a pistol or in a revolver when the cartridge wasn't lined up with the barrel or when a bolt action rifle's bolt wasn't locked.
I know training is training but safety is safety.
 
showmebob said:
I was taught for years that if a gun goes click instead of bang to keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction for 30 seconds because you may have a hang fire, then eject the round.
My question is since instructors teach to immediately eject and chamber a new round is there any danger? Or, do hangfires just not happen with modern ammo? Or, are we just playing the odds?
Has anyone ever experienced a hang fire?
Click to expand...

I experienced a minor hang fire with a round from before WWII that I was given at the range that just happened to be 8mm Label caliber, the rifle I was shooting. It went click, then bang about 1 second later.

If a hang fire occurs after the round is ejected from the firearm, the only danger is possibly from shrapnel from the brass case exploding. Since there is nothing to contain the pressure when the round goes off outside the gun, and the bullet is the heaviest part of the round, the bullet won't really move at all and the case will blow apart.
 
I have only seen two instances of hang fire. One was with .410 shotgun ammo the other was with 50 BMG. If my buddy behind the 50 had flipped up the bolt, his life would be quite different today. Never hurts to be safe and it's free.
 
I think the 30 second wait time is one of those hold over rules/suggestions from when quality control in ammo wasn't as strictly regulated as it is today. I won't say that waiting is advice from a bygone era. I experienced a hangfire on a Kel-tec .380 that fired 1-2 seconds after the trigger was reset. Other than that I experienced a hangfire on an M249 that took standard action to clear.
 
What is blew up in face? Got hit in face by the brass, bullet, or powder burns? This one has been beat to death, outside a chamber a cartridge is a whole different thing than in a chamber. If the gun fired out of battery maybe, but ejected round going off isnt the same thing.
 
I was fairly young at the time so lack some of the details, but my mother and I were visiting that weekend, he went out shooting early in the morning (shooting a squirrel behind their farm house) and my grandmother came in and woke us up saying he had been shot, and my mother rushed him to the nearby hosipital about 10 miles away. I know the wound was in his neck, and even with a towel wrapped around his neck enough blood made it onto the cloth car seat to leave a stain about the size of a 50 cent piece (stain never came out of that seat). I am not sure exactly where in the neck he was hit, but assume it wa part of the cartridge casing. I still have the gun, it is a Winchester model 62 slide action.
 
Tap, rack and pull.
Click to expand...
Actually, I train Tack, Rack, Ready. The dynamic can change dramatically during Tap and Rack. Pull may no longer be the correct next step.

As for training verses shooting, and not to hijack the thread but it seems relevant, how do you structure your Tap/Rack drills? Do you use dummy rounds to simulate a failure? Or are you using a different method? On the one hand it seems reasonable to suggest that if you are intentionally using dummy rounds then you could Tap/Rack when it's appropriate and delay when it happens for real with live ammo but on the other hand, I wonder if you train regularly then your training would kick in and you would Tap/Rack before you thought about it. If the later is true, then that underscores the need to train Tap, Rack, Ready instead of Tap, Rack, Pull or Tap, Rack, Bang.
 
Plan2Live said:
Actually, I train Tack, Rack, Ready. The dynamic can change dramatically during Tap and Rack. Pull may no longer be the correct next step.

As for training verses shooting, and not to hijack the thread but it seems relevant, how do you structure your Tap/Rack drills? Do you use dummy rounds to simulate a failure? Or are you using a different method? On the one hand it seems reasonable to suggest that if you are intentionally using dummy rounds then you could Tap/Rack when it's appropriate and delay when it happens for real with live ammo but on the other hand, I wonder if you train regularly then your training would kick in and you would Tap/Rack before you thought about it. If the later is true, then that underscores the need to train Tap, Rack, Ready instead of Tap, Rack, Pull or Tap, Rack, Bang.
Click to expand...
Tap, rack and assess. I should have been more clear.
 
Never have experienced or witnessed a hang fire in all my years in Law Enforcement, hundreds of matches and hunting. However, malfunctions abound and my current training is tap, rack, assess (or ready). I'm not saying it doesn't happen.
 
had a few at my hunter safety class years ago. was with 22LR. We held for ~10sec and then ejected & moved on. Was possibly a bad gun intentionally since it was always the same gun and there was a ceasefire called on every hang.

haven't seen one other than that.
 
I know this is slightly off topic but I had a hang fire when sighting in my muzzleloader before deer season. I kept it pointed down range for two minutes before I did anything.
 
If you are shooting targets for score it is prudent to observe hang-fire drills.

OTOH if you are practicing life saving drills, you don't have that option in real life, and that is what such drills are designed to instill. Have 1st aid training and resources, immediate 911 access.
Or just back off the risk a little bit.

Make your decision and take the consequences. Train accordingly.

It's not brain science.
 
I have been shooting just about everything for more then 50 years.

I could count on one hand the number of "real" hang-fires I have experienced.
And still have some fingers left over.

Those I have experienced were when firing very old Berdan primed mil-sup ammo from foreign countries.

A real hang-fire is almost so rare with modern boxer primed ammo as to be right up there with Unicorns and the Easter Bunny.

Dud rounds are a completely different animal.

Duds are common with .22 rimfire, more so lately then 30 years ago.
Quality of .22 RF ammo is lower then it has ever been in my life it seems.

I have even had a couple of duds where there was no flash hole drilled in the cartridge case on GI issue 5.56 NATO ammo.

But regardless of that, a dud is a dud.
The primer either didn't ignite, or the flame couldn't reach the powder charge.
And it is not going to ignite if you eject the round and put it in your pants.

Thats my story, and I'm sticking too it.

rc
 
xfyrfiter said:
Unless you are in a gunfight what does it hurt to wait a bit? However if you are training, rather than target shooting, train like you fight. Tap, rack and pull.
Click to expand...

That's the problem right there. It's relatively easy to instill one habit or the other but not both.

Sent from my ADR6425LVW using Tapatalk 2
 
"But regardless of that, a dud is a dud.
The primer either didn't ignite, or the flame couldn't reach the powder charge.
And it is not going to ignite if you eject the round and put it in your pants."

Exactly, there is safety and there is fear of something you dont understand. People tend to give ammunition way more fear and mystery than it deserves, it is an inanimate object totally under our control. It didnt go off, no big deal, it's not going to "get" you
 
The thing is you never know if it is a dud or a hang fire unless you give it some time. I personally have never seen one take more than a few seconds, with a fraction of a second being much more common, but do you really want to bet it will not go off at the worst moment, say when the breach is open, but the round is still mostly in the chamber. At least you might want to consider your clearing technique and use one where the muzzle is kept pointed in a safe direction and you minimize your exposure to the round being ejected, particularly while it is still partly chambered.
 
I have shot tens of thousands of rounds by this point and have never seen a hang fire.

A couple duds, maybe.

However, it cannot hurt to be safe. In a combat situation (or practice for one), it's good to tap rack bang immediately. But if you're just messing around on the range, why not give it a few extra seconds?

I heard it has more to do with older propellants, like cordite. It may be a greater concern with surplus ammo.
 
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