No more steel targets

[Erik_in_Hoyt]

I remember shooting .38 wad cutters with the target on a piece of conveyer belt. Bullets were coming back to us about 30 yards, without real power, but they flew close enough. It was freezing too, and I think that help the rubber to bounce those slugs back so far.

I had a similar experience with .38 spl years back as well, with the bullet bouncing back through the grass and stopping just short of our shooting position.

I also had experience at a couple of cowboy shoots where I was getting peppered with shot from the 12 ga target on the next stage over. after the second month in a row with the same thing happening, I stopped going to that gun club. May be able to start it back up again, though - I hear they've had a complete changeover in the staff running the shoots and have tightened up their safety regs quite a bit in the 7 or 8 years since I was last there.

 

[DieselPower]

I can remember years ago long before I had proper back stops and a bullet trap. I was doing some target practice with a 9mm using hand loaded cast lead bullets. I was shooting into a large log that the target was stapeled to. Was blasting away and something hit me in the left shin. Looked around on the ground and found a deformed round. I checked the log and it looks like what happened was I had such a mass of bullets stuck in it one of them bounced back at me. Didn't hurt or even leave a mark but it did put a end to using logs as back stops.

 

[GaryM]

I shoot steel in practice or as part of our IDPA matches and sometimes get hit with pieces of lead or jacket material. Unusual during a match because the steel's at least 10 yards out and we're using handguns, but during practice the steel might be a lot closer and we get peppered once in a while.

 

[dmccarty]

I have been hit by a bullet fragment that bounced back from a steel target. It hit me in the leg and stung a bit. We did this once. It was either a 9mm or .38.

Later,
Dan

 

[MossRoad]

In the late 70's I was on a rifle team in my teens and we used to shoot .22 indoors on a 50' range at the YMCA. It had a metal backstop at a 45 degree angle down into a sand trap. If you looked at the ceiling above the range it had thousands of lead scrape marks coming back towards the shooting stations. Every once in a while you would feel something hit you in the face or forearms. If that happened, we had to tell our instructor and they'd close that lane. The ceiling above the shooting stations had suspended ceilings. There were bullet fragments embedded in the panels.

The problem was people would bring in high powered guns during off-hours (a range no-no) and they'd dent the backstop, causing deformities that would then direct the .22s back towards the stations instead of down into the trap. Many times lanes would be closed until maintenance could grind down, weld in or replace the steel sheeting all together.

A less serious story.... Back in the early 80's I bought a BB machine gun powered by freon. I was working at the airport and was showing it to our mechanic in an empty hangar. He wanted to see it shoot and told me to shoot at an old power unit across the hangar. So I did. YIKES! A golden stream of BBs went across the hangar and promptly returned directly at us at umpteen thousand rounds per second. We got sand blasted!

 

[jinman]

When I was 12 years old, my brother and I were planting blackeye peas. We had an old horse-drawn 1-row planter that we hooked behind a row cultivator on our tractor. One person drove the tractor and the other walked behind with the planter.

A neighbor's grandson was shooting turtles in a pond about 300 feet across the fenceline. I had talked to him when we first got to the field, before starting to plant. His name was Jimmy, the same as mine. Our mother's had shared the same hospital room when we were born. We were very good friends.

After my brother and I started planting, I heard several shots and then heard a ricochete quickly getting louder. POP! It hit me like a bee sting, right in my butt. I started screaming, "I've been shot! I'm shot!" as my bewildered brother jumped off the tractor to check me out. He didn't believe me at first, so I dropped my pants to show him. Right on the lower crease where my butt cheek met my leg, there was a huge red and black bruise about an inch in diameter. At my feet, we found the flattened 22 slug about the diameter of a dime.

I turned to my friend who was directly across the pond from us and had his gun aimed to shoot again. My brother and I ran out of his line of sight and started screaming at him to stop. With all our carrying on, he finally saw us waving and shouting. I was so scared, I was screaming at him. I told him if he shot again, I was going to throw his gun into the pond. He didn't believe me until I showed him the evidence, and I don't think he really believed it then. Nevertheless, he quit shooting and we went back to planting. That evening when we got back to the house, I checked my pants. The hip pocket on my jeans had a hole through two layers of cloth and my skivvies had a hole in them too.

The welt on my butt was as big as a baseball. Luckily, I was a fat little kid and my butt had plenty of padding. There are lots of other places that bullet would have done some serious damage. It probably hit me in the best place it possibly could.

 

[Podunkadunk]

I seem to think that the 'steel' targets you guys are referring to in all these "bounce-back" and 'ricochet" stories is just that....steel. You guys correct me if I'm wrong, please.

Shooting a piece of run of the mill "steel" will get you hurt. First of all, if it will dimple, crease, or even make a small hole in the steel, it's the wrong steel! You can really get hurt with this stuff.

If you want to shoot steel safely, buy some brinell 500, or rockwell 52 or higher, that's made as armor plate or for shooting. They'll tell you when you buy it what you can/cannot shoot it with. It will completely splatter the round and will not ricochet. Follow the directions of the manufacturer and you'll be fine. Shooting any other type of steel is dangerous and I'm sure that at one time or another, we're all pretty much guilty.

Podunk

 

[dmccarty]

A less serious story.... Back in the early 80's I bought a BB machine gun powered by freon. I was working at the airport and was showing it to our mechanic in an empty hangar. He wanted to see it shoot and told me to shoot at an old power unit across the hangar. So I did. YIKES! A golden stream of BBs went across the hangar and promptly returned directly at us at umpteen thousand rounds per second. We got sand blasted!

Well, we all know what happened to Ralphy and his Red Ryder BB Gun.

Later,
Dan

 

[MossRoad]

Well, we all know what happened to Ralphy and his Red Ryder BB Gun.

Later,
Dan

You'll shoot your eye out!

 

[MossRoad]

jinman

That's a pretty good story! Glad you weren't mortally wounded. Could have been bad, bad, bad for sure.

I remember shooting a pellet gun at floating beer bottles in a lake behind our house. I was amazed that a pellet could skip that far. We would get down level with the water on a still evening and see how far apart we could make the skips. We had some go several hundred yards to the opposite bank and that was just an air rifle.