For Frosty...

[gary m]

What is it about you and Frosty and “how’s the leg” you may ask.
Well, it goes back a couple years and in the interest of public service and at the risk of my own ego and humility, here’s the story.
A few years ago after getting my CCW, I decided to pick up a new gun. I went to the local range and test fired a few models I was interested in by Glock, S&W, Sig, Ruger and Springfield Armory and decided on the Springfield XD9 compact.

Now let me back up a bit and say that all of the guns I tested are striker fired (no external hammer) and with the exception of the S&W and Ruger have no external safety to uncock the firing mechanism once loaded. This was something I wasn’t thrilled about as all my other semi-autos have some sort of decocker mechanism that will drop the hammer and block it from striking the firing pin.

I had gone to the range with my new gun and shot off a few hundred rounds to get the feel of it and break it in a bit. Leaving the range, I reloaded the gun and put it in the center console of my car which is where I would keep it stored when I felt like taking it with me. To me, if I am keeping it unloaded, I might as well carry a brick, which is a better defensive weapon than an unloaded gun although as events soon turned out, less painful and messy.

After getting home, I went to clean it as I always do with any gun after a trip to the range. Going to my bench in the basement, I took out the magazine and went to unload it before stripping it for cleaning.
In order to clear out the loaded chamber, I had to cycle the slide to eject the round. The XD9 has 2 safeties. One is a palm or grip safety that must be pressed for the slide to cycle and works in combination with the trigger safety (small lever built into the trigger) to release the striker to fire the gun.

In the process of pulling back the slide (which required the grip safety to be pressed), the slide slipped from between my thumb and fingers. Being a new gun, the slide spring was still quite stiff and the slide serrations on the XD9 (as I soon found out) are not the most aggressive or deepest cut.
The sudden stop of the slide going forward caused the gun to jerk forward and my once outside the guard trigger finger hit the boom button.

After my ears stopped ringing, my first thought was obviously about my soon to be pissed wife wondering what the fuck just happened. My second thought a few seconds after that was where did all this fucking blood come from.

I had been sitting in a chair and the bullet went into the inside of my left leg about 3 inches above the knee and had exited the other side about 4 inches below.

All this was followed by screaming wife, police, upset wife, ambulance, hospital and miraculously no major damage. No bone, no major veins or arteries and no major muscle trauma. Just a few months of limping around, bunch or real good pain killers and other than a fading powder burn on the one side and a round scar where it came out, no permanent injury.

I told Frosty about this in a PM a few weeks to a month after it happened and swore him to secrecy, which to his credit and probable consternation, he kept until I made a few slight references to it on the board some months later. This has opened our back and forth ribbing of his asking how my leg is doing and my only nagging reminder, although he usually only reminds me once or twice a month.

[Frostbit]

Wow, I forgot completely about this.

[gary m]

Wow, I forgot completely about this.

Me too, almost.
To be honest though, if I had a choice between what happened there and how it turned out and the prostate removal and related issues, I'd take the GSW any day. Dry firing ain't no fun if you know what I mean.

[Gingersnap]

I remember a similar type of thing happened to a member of The High Road. He detailed his story with pictures; it was most instructive.

[Adam]

Well, I hope you learned the lesson to point the gun away from you and at the ground (or at least somewhere where the round can do no harm) no matter how unloaded you think it is.



I personally have never had an AD, though my father once had one, fortunately just with a starter pistol, rather close to my head, which of course led to a great deal of panicking, not only by me and my father, but also my mother, who happened to be in the room at the time. Oddly (or not) enough, I had just told my father a few minutes before that he had to be careful with the thing and that if he intended to unload it, he needed to be sure he had a good grip on the hammer (that particular model required the hammer to be pulled back to half-cocked in order to release the cylinder and remove the blanks). So the 11-year-old basically wound up schooling his old man on gun safety, fortunately only at the cost of some ringing eardrums. I told him after the fact that he was not allowed to have guns any more, and despite being a pre-teen at the time, I stood my ground and made him give up the starter pistol to me for safekeeping. He didn't like it, but after what had just happened, my mother took my side and he no longer had a choice.

I don't even know whyinahell we had a starter pistol at all. It had come from my grandfather, who had died some years earlier, but no one knew of any particular reason that he should have one, either. It's not like he was a track coach or swimming coach or something. We finally sold it at a garage sale about eight years later to some guy who was a volunteer track coach at one of the struggling schools in town, so presumably he later put it to some good use for disadvantaged kids or something like that.

[Frostbit]

AD's happen. Doesn't make Gary a dumbshit......

Had a friend that shot a hole in the Bathroom door through the full length mirror while his wife was home (they are always home when you fuck up). He dry fires his pistol regularly because a "combat course" he took told him to. Oopsy, that time it had a live one in the chamber. He was on the can. Good laxative he told me.

I dry fire my 450 NE double almost daily (with snap caps). Want to have the double triggers being second nature since the only time I'll ever use the gun is on very dangerous game. I swear, even though I know they are snap caps, I check the bases by breaking the action every time I think about pulling a trigger. I've shot my mounted buffalo about a trillion times now.

[Adam]

I guess I'm just hyper-vigilant about these sorts of things. Way back before I even went into Scouts, I went to camp and we had a little rifle range, just two positions and kids shooting prone with .22 rifles at paper targets. Huge hill for a backstop, and probably enough lead embedded there to keep the Army in ammo for half a year if they bothered mining it.

We had a fierce instructor there. Retired drill instructor, IIRC, but that's been a long time ago. If your muzzle was ever anything but pointed exactly downrange, it was 20 push-ups the first time, fifty the second, one hundred the third, and then he kicked you off the range if you did it again after that. And he stopped everything to force everyone else to count your push-ups if you did that. So it got instilled in me at a very young age (probably 9 or 10) about always keeping my muzzle pointed away from anything at all unless I actually intended to harm it or anything behind it. To this day, every single gun is loaded to me, and none ever get pointed anywhere where they can harm a person or property (within reason; most houses have floors, but I'm conscientious about who or what may be beneath that floor at all times) if a weapon is in my hand, be that the old trusty 12-ga or a carry weapon or anything else. Unless it says "NERF" on the side, I always treat it like it's ready to go off without me even wanting it to and obliterating something ten miles away. I never, ever clean a weapon unless it's so disassembled that it cannot possibly fire, and I never touch the trigger when I'm doing that with the sole exception that a Glock can only be disassembled with the trigger down, so I lock the slide back and of course remove the magazine and I only drop that trigger when I can see daylight through the breach all they way down to the floor/table/whatever. And if I wasn't that conscientious about it, I would never be comfortable carrying at condition 1, which is how I always carry; your gun doesn't do you much good for defense if it's not ready to fire.

Perhaps they're odd habits, but they make it pretty hard to put holes where I don't intend to put them.