Not the fault of the rifle or the ammo. This was clearly operator error, and a failure of training and basic respect for the rifle. Shooter had a push-feed Ruger in .308 Winchester. Had already slid one round into the chamber, but he hadn't closed the bolt to force the extractor over the case rim. He then pulls the bolt back, and seeing no round attached to the bolt, feeds a second round into the rear of the round already in the chamber. I don't know what kind of force he applied to the bolt to fire the primer on the round in the chamber, but it was probably less than the force applied to his hand and wrist by the bolt when the cartridge went off. I've been working on ranges for more than forty years and have never seen this kind of kaboom before. It blew the back off the chambered case, with melted copper jacket from the bullet of case #2 all around the primer pocket. It bent case #2 about in half as the pressure tried to escape. Snappped the rim off case #2, broke the extractor, and ejector and blew the guts out of the magazine. Completely splintered the synthetic stock and drove pieces of it into the shooters hand. Corpsmen patched him up and stopped the bleeding, but they left the splinter in his hand after checking his torso for more potentially fatal splinters The lesson? Know your firearm, respect it, and never force things. If it isn't working, stop and figure out the problem. The weekday RSO and I sat down today and looked over his box of blown up cases, broken shells extracted by other shells. Wrong ammo fired in the gun and incredibly bad reloads. The fact that we each have such a box says all you need to know about firearm training. Get some. Ask questions. Don't be "That guy" and don't forget to say "See you next time" when you leave.
I've witnessed three Kabooms, luckily not fatal. Worst was a Ruger Mini-30 that fired out of battery, splintering the stock. He got splinters in his hand too. Second was an AR-15, also OOB incident, blew it's gut through the thankfully empty magazine. No harm to operator, but the shock nearly toppled me off the bench behind him! Third wasn't actually a Kaboom in the regular sense. Young man is shooting an inline ML, just reloaded and left the ramrod in the bore. We saw but couldn't stop him in time.... KABOOM! The aluminum ramrod, a very overweight projectile, went tumbling downrange, blew sideways through the target backing and impacted the sand berm. It was mangled. Kid got a bloody nose from the extra-heavy recoil, his t-shirt was bloody. Rifle was okay. He was worried, as he was getting married next day, and his girlfriend had told him to "be careful!" I'm sure he got a good chewing out from her!
I imagine it was quite a surprise to the shooter when the bolt he'd been pushing forward was suddenly accelerating rearward with great force. First thing I asked was if it was Federal ammunition since their primers are different. The Ammo was Aguila. Impossible for me to identify the exact bullet weight and design, but they offer several loadings in .308 Winchester that use full metal jacket bullets with pointy tips. It still took a lot of forward force on the bolt and amazingly bad luck for the second bullet tip in a push fed bolt gun to exactly line up with the primer anvil of the one in the chamber. Nice of Ruger to make their rifles feed so consistently, but I think I'll stick with my old controlled feed action.
You should have reminded him, that only MY character (Marvin the Martian) should be dealing out kabooms!
Back in 1973 I bought a Fed Ord 1903 Springfield parts gun from Academy Surplus back when Max was still alive. A garage dealer in town sold tons of surplus ball for anything imaginable, and I bought ‘06 ball ammo from him at 5 cents per round. Some of it was the cupronickel nickel silver jackets. I had went thru 40+ rounds one day when I had a recoil that felt like I had fired a cannon off hand. I thought that my left thumb had been broken by the bolt cocking device traveling rearward and impacting my hand. I was OK so I opened the bolt ( not difficult) and examined the cartridge case. It had three lateral splits just above the extractor groove. The barrel looked good so we did a chambering test with another cartridge. Loaded and extracted ok. At the time I did not know which round had caused the problem as we all had been shooting various mfg. types. Tied the rifle to a tree and string fired five copper jacked rounds (no silver left) with no problem. Stupid I know, but I shot another hour of so before going home. Should have had it checked by a gunsmith but was too stupid. Every week I spent a couple of hours shooting 5.00-10.00 worth of ammo with no problem. Ended up with some more “Silver Bullets”. Dad wanted to shoot some of the milspec stuff so I gave him a couple of hand fulls. One was silver and the same thing happened to him as myself. He blamed me for giving him one of my faulty reloads (never gave any to anyone) as he was scared of reloading and assumed I was the culprit. A couple of months later, I was shooting again and had a silver bullet loaded and the same blowup happened again. This time I knew what it was and took the rifle in for a checkup. It was ok and I still have it. Had my Dad’s examined too and it was OK, and I still have it. Fed Ords are stronger than most people think. I was young, inexperienced, and stupid. Blessed that I didn’t lose a hand or eye. My faulty reloads were 130 gr Spear SPs over enough 4895 for approximately 2700 FPS. Mild recoil, accurate and killed deer very effectively. Under pressured to say the least. Moral of the story: have a competent gunsmith, and avoid old military ammo. Jim
I bet that the above issue was from a Double Charged Round, and most likely the cause… Even Ex-Mil Ammunition can have a similar issue…
I never had overpowered milsurp ammo. Only problem I ever had was duds. Bought 300 rounds of milsurp Yugo 8mm Mauser once from The Sportsman's Guide. Never got more than a dozen to actually fire. Pulled the bullets, weighed and separated by weight groups - a LOT of variance. Berdan brass into the scrap bin, powder into the flower bed. Nitrogen fertilizer! Found a LOT of variance in bullet and charge weights in Russian 7.62X54R too. Weighed/separated them, bullets and powder, then carefully reloaded. Accuracy much improved! I did get a couple case splits trying to shoot commercial .308Win in my CETME rifle. Big no-no! Luckily none stuck in the chamber.
