One in a row....

I've gotten several emails (and one comment) about the KaBoom pictures below. Here is what I know:

The rifle is (used to be) a Browning A-bolt in .300 Winchester Magnum. I was not present when the explosion occurred....I was at the other end of the range preparing to teach a shotgun class. The situation was well in hand by the time I arrived on the scene. The firing line had been shut down and made safe, all shooters except the injured parties had been escorted off of the range and were waiting in the parking lot, an RSO and a shooter had gone to the highway to flag down the ambulance and guide them to the range, another RSO was working crowd control, and two more RSO's were administering first aid to the shooter and his partner. I secured my section of the range and started working the crowd in the parking lot.

This happened at about 8am, just as parents were arriving to drop their kids off for my shotgun class. Yet again I was (and still am) very happy to teach in a rural farming community. In "the big city" there probably would have been parents turning around and leaving as soon as they saw the ambulances in the parking lot. Out in the sticks the response was quite different - they understand that sometimes bad things happen no matter how careful you are. One father told me "Show them the blood. That'll teach 'em that this is serious shit."

With the kind permission of the injured shooter, my assistant brought the safety glasses and some pieces of the rifle over for a quick show-and-tell with our students.


The safety glasses are particularly interesting:


You'll note that there is no right earpiece. When the barrel thread/locking lug area of the action let go, the bolt came back and struck the right lens of the shooting glasses with enough force to crack the lenses, tear the earpiece off, and knock the glasses completely off the shooter's head. The shooter had some minor cuts where the glasses had been forced back into his face, but the alternative would have been a rifle bolt where his right eye used to be.

You might want to think about that the next time one of us "range nazis" tells you that you cannot be on the range without safety glasses. As I said below, the shooter and his partner walked away with only minor injuries.

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