Carelessness at the Range

Hey Corky,

Don't take it too hard, neighbor. You are in good company. I learned the lesson of having more than one caliber of ammo on the bench at the same time in a similar fashion.......I tried to chamber a .243 Winchester round in to a 7X57mm rifle. Luckily it didn't fit.....remember I said not to take it too hard? Here's why:

Several years ago a friend and I were instructing a class in our state's concealed carry course at a local range. My friend and partner was the armorer and chief firearms instructor for a good size local police department for 28 years and was also one of the best pistol smiths I've ever seen. He had done some repair work on a .40 caliber auto pistol for a fellow and we decided to test fire it after all the students had gone home. He fired most of a mag before he figured out why it was throwing bullets five feet off at 25 yards, and guess what, yep, he had loaded the mag with 9mm rounds. I'll bet there's not one guy on this forum who hasn't either done something similar or come mighty close to it. It goes with having guns of several calibers in which the cartridges tend to look similar. And look at the bright side......you learned something very important and didn't get hurt doing it.

If it was me, I'd have the pistol looked at by a good smithy just to be safe. Firing a smaller cartridge than a gun was chambered for may or may not damage a semiautomatic pistol, depending on the gun and the calibers involved. But it's not a safe thing to do in most cases. Hope this helps and happy SIGging.

Jerry

Welcome to the club :-/

don't be to hard on yourself but instead treat it as a very good lesson.
i have seen many times at work the wrong ammo being loaded into the wrong guns, and have also done it myself.

one example was a live 357 round stuck in a 44magnum lever action barrel. the gun sat in the locker with this round down the spout for 6 days. only to be discovered when the next person who used the rifle tried to load the 44mag. fortunately it would not allow the breach to close but i hate to think what would have happened if it had have set of the primers?? :-[ lucky for us the person in question quit his job not long after as he continually issued wrong ammo.

Ive also seen 9mms go off in .40Cal's and 357Sig's too without any ill effects (so far)

another one to watch out for and just as equally as important happened to me just 3 days ago.

i loaded a 9mm into a Glock 17. the shell in question had a "proud primer". i racked the slide and when the breach closed the bullet fired. there was no fire pin indent on the case, the breach block simply fell onto the primer and set it off. lucky for me the gun was down range in a safe direction, but i was well aware of the situation before loading the gun in any case.

yes probably a silly thing to do. next time i will discard the faulty ammo and send it off to be crushed in an industrial furnace at the reloading factory.

at the end off the day stay alert, ALWAYS practises safe handling methods and DOUBLE check everything.

safe gunning to all, BB.

The biggest danger of firing a 9mm in a .40 chamber is that it'll lock your gun up during a firefight. The smaller case is unsupported, so the pressure is expended in destroying the case, and the bullet doesn't travel nearly as fast, nor is the recoil energy always sufficient to cycle the action. I've seen this happen to a friend, who was shooting his carry ammo so he could start fresh. The ammunition in his .40 Glock mags had ridden on his duty belt for at least three months, and one of the rounds in the gun was a 9mm. Below is the result. The round didn't cycle the action, though it did eject the empty. I heard a BANG! BANG! BANG! POP! and immediately yelled at him to cease fire, thinking that he might have gotten an underpowered round that could have left a bullet stuck in the barrel.



Apparently the 9mm round got into the magazine when he was reloading after a range trip. We habitually carry several different calibers of weapons to the range, and this appears to be a case where the refilling of mags was done in a somewhat disorganized fashion.

When I first got my Taurus 9mm, I went down the road to the closest gunshop that was open at the time. It was nice, not having to drive across the county.

I asked for 9mm ammo, and went home and shot it. I couldn't figure out why the heck it wouldn't cycle as it was obviously 9mm, reading


on the box of Blazer ammo.

I looked the stuff up on the internet, and went back and explained things to the owner. He apologized, but wouldn't make things right with either a refund or another box of ammo.

That incident was a learning experience for me, and colored my relations with that gunshop for years afterward.

Josh <><