Brass Hurts

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So I went out to the range this weekend, which is one of my many past-times, and my Class III machine gun dealer friend and I decide we’re going to do some rifle shooting that day.

We break out the HK-71, (or G-3 for those of you who only know guns from video games), which is for all intents and purposes a sniper rifle. We decide, “Hell! It’s only 300 yards to the end of the range. Let’s go open sights!”, so we take the scope off and start calibrating by killing a couple of milk jugs we had set up. My friend, (hereafter refered to as K-Man, that’s his nickname), is a much better rifle shot than I am, so he’s gonna sight everything in. (I think I’m better with the sub-guns so it evens out). Anyway, he hands me a pair of binoculars. I sight in the milk jug and I’m signalling him “Hit Low Right”, or “Miss Middle Left” depending.

Well, to make a long story short, I’m sitting on a 5 gallon bucket to the right of the weapon. My first mistake. My second was to move up along side the HK-71, so I can see the milk jug better. I’m sighted in, and all of a sudden, I hear “Blam!” and then this searing fire racing all the way down my arm.

Yup, you guessed it. The brass ejected right onto the back of my hand and felt it nessecary to roll down my arm. I screamed, because for some reason [understatement] .308 gets pretty damn hot. [/understatement]

Of course, K-man doesn’t hear me because of his hearing protection on, and continues to fire thinking that me throwing my arm out was “Hit High Left”. So the next casing hits me in the back of the neck as I’m turning, and rolls down my shirt.

Ow!

So I get up and run to the truck… K-man turns to look at me and sees only this lanky freak flailing his arms and running away. He doesn’t know what to think. I’m cursing and trying to find the Aloe when K-man rolls up to me. “You okay man?”, he asks.

“NO! G-d Damn It!!”

“What happened…?”

I turned to him with what must have been the most pitiful look I’ve ever had and just said… “Brass Hurts”

He laughed his ass off. Which I just didn’t appreciate at the time. I now have a neat little burn-scar, that’s healing rather nicely running down my arm. And an even better burn scar, that can’t heal so nicely because I can’t put aloe on it, running down my back.

I just thought I’d share me story. Perhaps I shoulda put this under “Stupidest Thing I’ve Done” Oh well, now it’s in your brain and you’re stuck with it.

2

I thought this was goning to be a story about brass knuckles. But I feel your pain man, I still got a scar on my chin from an M-16 shell casing. mumble grumble stupid right handed spent round ejection

3

I thought this was going to be a story about the time TubaDiva threw a sousaphone at me.

4

When I was in the army we sometimes used blanks in the field. M-16 brass stays pretty cool. You can almost catch it with your bare hands as it comes out, especially the blanks. Anyway, a friend and I used to see who could pelt the other with brass when the other wasn’t paying attention.
Ah, government money well spent. On some of our longer field problems, we used to have Funk-A-Thons as well, but I’ll leave that story for another day…

5

I was at the range a while back. Standing on my left was another shooter and his girlfriend.

About half way through the session, the girlfriend had positioned herself between the two of us in such a way that it was easy to watch both of us.

A casing from the other shooter hit his girlfriend in the neck and got hung up on the soft tissue by her turtleneck. I immediately started to reach for the casing when she moved due to the burning sensation, which caused the hot brass to pass through the neck and settle into her cleavage.

I was SOOOO relieved that in once smooth motion she got her hands into the sweater and removed the casing before I had to decided whether to go fishing for her.

(She saw the look on my face and smiled appreciatively at my confusion and hesitation.)

:smiley:

6

We go shoot at Swan Creek range in Huntsville, AL. They have a bi-annual machine gun shoot that is a total blast. Lot’s of belt-feds, MG-34s, 19-19s, and the like. I’ve had the pleasure of shooting most of these guns and it is total fun.

Anyway, the line gets pretty crowded about mid-day with all the shooters. I was feeding belts for K-man through his MG-34, and a guy with Glock-18 comes right up behind me and lets fly the hot 9mm death that only a Glock-18 can spew. (Automatic pistols rock my world! I want one!) Every single one of those casings hit me square between the shoulder blades as I was feeding a belt. I was wearing a flannel shirt so the experience was actually quite pleasurable.

One of the best back rubs I’ve ever had. Even if it was over rather quickly. (Glock-18s don’t hold many rounds, and you can go through a clip rather quickly. Oh yes…)