Safety alert

[JKSNIPER]

I was assisting at a LE Basic sniper school a couple weeks ago when this happened....

One of the students was having trouble chambering a round. I watched as he extracted a case from his Savage 110 rifle and then attempted to chamber another round but couldn't get the bolt closed.

Suddenly the light bulb came on and I went over to him and stopped him. I checked the casings lying next to him and there was one with a good primer still in it.

Made the rifle clear safe and empty and gazed down the barrel...yep no light.

The bullet had made contact with the rifling and when the shooter went into "bolt overwatch" condition he pulled the bullet from the casing spilling the powder all over the place. When he attempted to close the bolt for some reason (lucky for him) the case did not line up with the bullet in the chamber/throat area and allow the bolt to close. Otherwise he would have had the primer propel the round only a short way into the barrel and might not have realized what happened and tried to fire another round which(to quote Igan from Ghostbusters) would be bad.

To make it worse he was shooting without eye protection despite being told about a zillion times to always wear eye pro when shooting.

We drifted the round out of the barrel using a cleaning rod and he was excused from bolt overwatch for the rest of the school after the third or fourth bullet was pulled.

Problem was NOT with the ammo's OAL. he was using Federal Gold Medal Match ammo 168 gr BTHP rounds. There were 4 Savage rifles on the line and all shot well and had no problems except this one.

2 things from this...

1. ALWAYS wear eye protection when shooting. You only get 2 eyes...guard them well.

2. WHen something goes wrong STOP and check it out and do NOT proceed until you are certain everything is ok.

[R-Bros_JLR]

Well good catch dude. Sounds to me like those rounds were too long for his chamber...otherwise they wouldn't have stuck in the chamber. Jamming a bullet in the lands is pretty common but there's a fine line there before you start sticking bullets.

[JKSNIPER]

I know but we had other Savage rifles of the same model on the line 2 of which were firing rounds from the same lot number of ammo without any problems. This guys chamber/throat area was cut a little too tight to tolerances. I had occasion to speak to the folks from Savage at an unrelated event the next week and they said "That rifle needs to come back to the factory...NOW!"