Have you ever been struck by a ricochet?

[American_Pit_Bull]

I have felt pieces of the jacket come back many times, but that is to be expected...

Only once did I get hit with a .45acp ricochet. It was my own round and it hit pretty hard.
It gave me a blood blister through a sweatshirt.

 

[NonConformist]

Yep, guy shooting a .22 revolver somehow bounced a round off an upright downrange and the bullet hit me on the shoulder coming down. left a mark but no penetration!

 

[distra]

Oh yeah. 240gr .44mag bullet thrown right back at me by a bowling pin. Hit me the left temple right about the frame of safety glasses. Hurt like a b**** left a nasty bruise.

 

[swiftak]

I got a .45 acp bullet in the kneecap that someone had shot at a steel plate. There wasn't alot of force behind it but it left an impression on the skin.

 

[Phil DeGraves]

Anyone that has ever done any cowboy shooting has likely been hit many times (as have I). That's why they specify "no jacketed ammo."

 

[texfed]

I've been hit a few times....older ranges with heavily used berms are the worst offenders!
On duty now, we wear vests during practice due to ricochets ! Sure lends credibility to shrapnel proof safety glasses!

 

[Splodge Of Doom]

Never myself, but when I was about eight my Dad and I were plinking with an air pistol in the garden. He fired a shot and then did a funny kinda jump... The pellet came flying back and went up the sleeve of his t-shirt.

And a friend of mine who was in the army has a pin in his shoulder from a 5x5.6 ricochet on a live fire exercise. He didn't even know he been shot until someone pointed at all the blood...

 

[NonConformist]

I always trained in the gear Id likley have in a fight, like Armor etc

Now my only armor is my Oakleys

 

[GEM]

Had my chin split by a fragment off a steel plate. I was standing in back of a guy who had a lead WC 45 ACP bounce off a tire and give him quite a whack.

Had some cuts on my arms from fragments at matches.

Waaaah!

 

[Gaffer]

Ricochets is why the chickens in NRA Hunter Pistol were moved from 25 meters to 40 meters to prevent the number of accidents from fragments coming back to the shooting line. Made the game tougher as they did not increase the size of the chickens. But it was done for that reason alone, too many back splatter incidents.

 

[sacp81170a]

Working as a range officer for a steel plate shoot, we had 4 different bays going on the range. Sitting under one of those shade canopy things you could hear a fairly steady rain of lead fragments on it from the bay next to us. They were on the other side of a berm about 20 yards away. Yep, wear eye and ear protection at all times while on the range, folks.

 

[Correia]

About two dozen times with fragments, (run enough matches and teach enough classes, just a fact of life) once with a whole .308 from 25 yards that smashed my shooting glasses and knocked the crap out of me, once with a chunk of jacket that stuck in the crease between my nostril and face and had to come out with a pair of needle-nose pliers. That was the worst.

 

[Deanimator]

I used to shoot at an indoor range in Brunswick Hills, OH. It used sheets of fabric (burlap?) to prevent backsplash. They would frequently let the sheets get heavily damaged without replacing them. One day I was shooting and I felt an intense burning sensation in the back of one of my hands. I looked down and I had a piece of copper jacket material sticking out of the back of my hand. I pulled it out, washed the wound and put a bandaid on it, then went back to shooting.

 

[Old Grump]

As part of the White Sands combined Army/Navy pistol team in 72 or 73 we went to a match in Arizona where the club had just literally rebuilt the range up from ground zero with new everything and it was beautiful. Finally got to 25 yard timed fire and 2 or 3 shots in everybody was putting their guns down and yelling cease fire. Back stop at 25 yards was a neat stack of dirt filled tires and our rounds were bouncing off and coming back to whack us. Had to wait an hour while the range master apologized profusely and a few club members showed up with trucks and shovels to remove the tires and repack the berm with sandbags temporarily. Apparently the range had just been completed the night previously and we were the first shooters. Cut trigger finger and right cheek, bruise on my little finger but one shooter had his gun box holed, others had shirts torn and big bruises on their belly, not much blood but lots of bruises. If that happened today they would have had their rear ends handed to them in a court room.

 

[panther22]

I was shooting 38spl SWC through a S&W model 10 at a farm once. There was an earthen berm behind the targets, but this is Missouri and there had to be rocks in the berm. I shot, and then felt something hit my right thigh, pretty hard. I looked down and there was the bullet, still in pretty good shape. I was wearing jeans, so I only had a little bruise. I still have the bullet in my change dish on the dresser.

 

[rondog]

I've never been hit, but I had a .22 slug whistle right over my head and hit my brother in the chest, who was right behind me watching me shoot. Raised a big ol' welt on his chest. He still talks about that, and it was over 40 years ago.

 

[steak-knife]

About a million years ago (okay, actually the early 90's), when I was issued .38 spl +P+ Hydroshocks, got hit in the knee by a richOchet. Didn't breaK through my jeans or break skin, but it did scare the crap out of me because I actually saw it coming at me, but my body wouldn't move out of the way fast enough.

 

[kcshooter]

I got hit with a Remington 230gr jhp, still fully intact but slightly mushroomed. The guy in the center lane next to me hit the only pillar in the range, about 25yds down, and it bounced right back and hit me in the shin. You can feel where it dented or chipped the shin bone, and it left a big goose-egg and bruise for about a week. I saved the bullet.

 

[FMJMIKE]

A 5.56 X 45 copper jacket hit me in the forehead when a friend opened up on a steel target at 20 yards with an AR-15....Yikes!!! Luckily it didn't break the skin.........

 

[grampster]

Yep. Twice if I don't count the pellet splatter from bird hunting when two groups are working a large cornfield unaware of each other.

One was a pellet riccochet that hit me in the finger that stung like the devil. The interesting one happened when I was a police cadet in 1963. I was assigned to the Record Bureau on a Saturday morning to print and mug shot arrestees from Friday night. It was slow, so I wandered down to the Detective Bureau. One of the old Detective Lieutenants was sitting at his desk and called me over. He pulled open a drawer on his ancient Steelcase desk and took out an old semi automatic handgun of some kind. He asked me if I remembered when some Puerto Rican terrorists shot up the House of Representatives in Washington DC. in 1954. I did, and he said that the handgun had been used in that event. He said it had jammed at a critical time and was still jammed and couldn't fire. I was about to ask him how he got it when the it fired as he was fooling with it. I immediately felt as if someone had slapped me in the thigh.

What happened was when the ND happened, the bullet hit the steel sided leg well in the desk. It riccocheted down off the steel desk, hit the hardwood floor, bounced off that and went across the room and hit a the metal flange that held a glass wind deflector on the sill of one of the large windows across the room. The bullet riccocheted nearly straight back off the flange and struck me in the thigh. I didn't even have a bruise but it stung.

You could imagine that the discharge caused a bit of bobbing and weaving in the Detective Bureau. It was Saturday, as I said, and there was only a couple detectives in the bureau as well as the Detective Sgt. sitting at the front desk. (I caught him out of the corner of my eye as the incident happened. I recall he went airborn out of his chair.) I secured a special place in the brotherhood in the Detective Bureau that morning as I kept silent about the incident, which got me much in the way of credibility over the years with the old line detectives. Doesn't hurt for a rookie having a covey of old grizzled detectives running interference when plum special assignments came up. In fact, I never said anything about that till many years after I left the PD.

I kept that bullet for many years, but somehow it got lost during one of our moves after I got married and had a family.

 

[2TransAms]

Still got a neat little scar where a piece of Gold Dot jacket came back and stuck in my lip. At least it wasn't in my eyeball. Bled like a stuck pig from that little piece of copper.

Now this all happened down in Juarez, Mexico and at the time was the least of my concerns...ok,it happened at an indoor range in Belleville.

 

[offroaddiver]

I had a bullet bounce off of me at a ipsc shoot when someone hit the frame on the texas star.

 

[f4t9r]

Not me but my buddy standing next to me got a 223 off a steel plate in his hand. After a trip to the hospital it made for one nasty scar.

 

[thebaldguy]

I got hit in the forehead by a piece of buckshot fired at an old water heater. It didn't break the skin, and we quit firing buckshot at old water heaters.

 

[bubbadavis]

I was shooting an old S&W model 10 and the timing was a little off. It was shaving a sliver off of every shot. I found this out when one sliver ricocheted off of a wooden post and embedded in my cheek. I quick dig with my Dad's pocket knife took care of it but it did wake me up!