Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch
(Post 405887)
A guy in my first year LS section was a former cop and a licensed gun dealer specializing in Smith & Wesson. We didn't see eye-to-eye about much, but Jeff and I got along just fine. We were always arguing about gun control -- me for, him against -- and he pontificated that people who had never fired a handgun had no business forming opinions about gun control policy. Jeff declared me unqualified to continue the discussion, given his pronouncement, so he set about remedying the situation by arranging for a group of us to go to an indoor range with a selection of his wares.
The range was a long corridor with a parabolic baffle made of steel plate at the far end, about 50 yards away. The bullets would ricochet against the baffle and up, then against another parabolic baffle in the ceiling and back, after which they would fall harmlessly to the floor behind the baffle to be swept up. Jeff therefore told us that firing into what looked like a steel wall was safe as kittens, because it was a mathematical certainty that all projectiles hitting the parabola would reflect upwards, not back. Each "lane" (I'm afraid I don't know the terminology; to me it seemed a bit like a bowling alley) had one of Jeff's guns, and you would progress from the smallest (the far right lane) to the largest (the far left). We progressed from a .22, to a .38, to a 9mm, to a .44, and finally to Jeff's pride and joy, a 10mm auto. (Jeff was the type of former cop that would occasionally go on a tear about how a 9mm didn't have adequate "stopping power" for beat cops to carry.) Each lane had a waist-high shelf on which you kept the ammunition and where you placed the gun when finished. I progressed to the left until Jeff motioned for me to take the far left lane, where the 10mm auto was.
Jeff had brought with him a selection of paper targets, including a couple with cartoonish drawings of vaguely ethnic looking robbers menacing white ladies with purses -- you would shoot at the exposed portion of the mugger/rapist without hitting the lady. So I'm firing the gun into the target and rescuing the lady from the Hamburgler with my powerful penis extender, when all of a sudden I feel a hard punch to the chest by an invisible force. I look around, thoroughly confused, when I see Jeff laughing silently (we were all wearing those headphone things), and he pointed me to the shelf in front of me, where there was a strangely beautiful bit of twisted copper and lead just sitting there. Through a series of miming actions, Jeff explained that I had edged too close to the right side of my lane, and was firing through the target at an angle to the left, so the bullets were striking not the parabolic baffle on the end wall, but the cinder block side wall on my left. He said he could see from his angle behind me what I couldn't -- there were puffs of debris where my shots were hitting the cinder blocks, then, for the most part, ricocheting safely into the baffle. But one of my shots apparently hit a seam in the cinder block and ricocheted straight backward toward me.
Jeff said that if it had hit me in the face it could have lacerated a cheek or broken my nose, and that I was lucky merely to be bruised in the chest. I kept the bullet -- it looked a little bit like a tiny partially bloomed lily -- but lost it when we moved.
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