To DQ one, both, or none

[Barrettone]

Thanks for the clarification Troy. Man, your guys heads must hurt remembering all this stuff.

Jeff

[Neil Beverley]

Chamber flags are worthless, IMHO.  I was at a rifle match a few months ago, and some %$#@ %@ who had a flag in his gun, while showing his rifle to another person, proceeded to point it at the 6 people who were down range.  The ^%$@ idiot and the RO both said that it, "wasn't a big deal, because there was a flag in the rifle and it was empty."      I've had too many "empty" firearms pointed at me in the brief 9 years that I have been shooting.

Chamber flags provide a real additional safety measure.

They are not a substitute for basic sound gun handling. It sounds from what you described that in an IPSC match the actions of the competitor would have (should have) led to a DQ.

It should be noted that for the original issue being discussed in this thread the use of a chamber flag, at least of the type that is inserted into the chamber, the problem would have been discovered on the line before the competitor left with the gun.

You've made me think of a pet peeve that I might launch in a separate thread a bit later.

[Vince Pinto]

A little clarification on Barritone's post.  I was the RO on the stage where this happened.  The "round" was a spent case that had failed to extract not a case with a head separation and so should have been apparent at the "make clear".  This happened on the stage immediately before mine.

John: A belated but nonetheless warm welcome to the BE Forums, and thanks for clarifying exactly what occurred. I can imagine the incident came as quite an unpleasant surprise!

This reminds me of my very first time as an extremely nervous trainee RO. My (nasty!) instructor set me up so that when I asked my first competitor to "LAMR", the competitor said, "Been there, done that, in the safety area. I'm ready to go". Of course I immediately gave him my "deer in the headlights" look, I peered at my instructor, but luckily he couldn't keep a straight face.

As soon as I changed my shorts, I proceeded ......

And I've since gotten my revenge on a few of my students, and the evil continues. BWA-HA-HA!

[JohnL]

Vince,

Thanks for the welcome. Yeah, it came as a rather unpleasant suprise. When the action opened it was not obvious that we had a spent round in the chamber and since the extractor was not ejecting the round we were faced with the problem of clearing the rifle before we could even think about how we should deal with how it got there.

The one thing I'm sure of as an RO is that I'll never live long enough to see everything.

Oh, a pet peve - It still suprises me how few competitors actually look at the chamber when clearing their guns.