What is a bullet if it’s not a well-sealed plug in the barrel? A finger, even if you could get one into the barrel of a gun, would only be compressing the air between the moving bullet and the end of the barrel. Can that really be enough to cause a breach?
Considering how instantanious the whole reaction is, changing it even the slightest will have violent reactions.
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A bullet moving down a barrel is very different from one just plugging the barrel. The difference is statis friction vs. dynamic. Think back to physics 101. Place a brick on a table. Measure the force needed to slide it. Notice that once it’s moving much less force is required to keep it moving. The same principle works in guns and is the difference between firing a bullet and having a hand grenade with a trigger.
With a few exceptions I’ll note later all bullets start moving in a free bore section where they do not seal the barrel. This distance may be from the cylinder to the barrel of a revolver or a section of a rifle barrel sometimes only a few thousands of an inch long. This allows the bullet to have some velocity before it is swaged (squeezed down) by the rifles section of the barrel where it makes a seal.
A good example of how a plugged barrel can blow up a gun is a squibb load in a revolver. A squibb is a cartridge with a missing or insufficient powder charge. The force of the primer is sometimes enough to put the bullet halfway down the barrel where it stops because the explosive force is not enough to overcome friction. No biggie.
It’s a BIGGIE if the shooter fires another round. This actually happend in competition sometimes. The next bullet is being propelled by a sufficient charge. Unfortunately the stuck bullet requires much higher pressure to overcome it’s static friction in the barrel. Since there is no place for the pressure to escape aside from a small cylinder gap something unpleasant will happen. Often the top of the cylinder explodes.
FWIW these squibb loads don’t happen often. Some action shooting competitors uses “mouse fart” ammunition that is very low powered. This means less recoil to recover from making it easier to shoot fast. The difference between a normal round firing and a squibb is so small the shooter may not even realize it and sometimes the range safety officer has to stop the shooter from firing another round.
The exceptions are muzzle loading rifles which work with soft lead round balls or Minie balls. Also some rifle ammunition for target use is loaded so the bullet is just touching the rifling. It’s not in the rifled section but there is no “free bore” section for the bullet to get moving. This technique is extremely sensitive to pressure variations in the loaded ammunition.
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How dare they put the Submit button right beside the Preview button! :smack:
This happened occasionally when a muzzle-loading cannon misfired during a battle. If the noise and confusion was great enough that the crew didn’t notice, they could ram a second or even a third charge into the gun on top of the original charge. This would often cause the gun to burst when it finally fired. As well, Civil War breechloaders were prone to sudden barrel failure due to design and manufacturing flaws, although these were mostly larger cannon.
A bit more resistance than just sticking a finger against the muzzle, though.
Interesting… responses so far vary from “yes, it will work, even a few drops of water can make a gun misfire” to “no way in heck, only in the movies”.
I’m no gun expert, nor particularly an expert in physics, but my instinct is that if you find a gun barrel that is just wider than your finger, and ram a good amount of finger down there (two knuckles or so), the gun will definitely jam, and very likely explode. The bullet flying along at a very high speed will encounter your finger, and even if it’s going fast enough to tear your finger to shreds, those shreds would have nowhere to go, everything will compress, and the expanding gas will not have enough energy to close-to-instantaneously accelerate a sizeable chunk of mass to a very high speed, particularly taking friction into account.
But I don’t really have any convincing evidence for that claim…
Empahsis mine. No one said that. I said a little water, a few drops clining to the inside of the muzzle, in a shotgun barrel can cause a bulge when fired.
I’m pretty sure the early M-16 could suffer a burst barrel from rainwater. Keep in mind that the bore is only .224", smaller than a pencil, so a few drops could form a “water plug.” The early M-16 also had an extremely thin walled barrel. Rifle cartridges often have peak pressures of upwards of 50,000psi and a plugged barrel would normally cause a failure in the reciever or bolt rather than the barrel.
It seems intuitive to me that…
Well, the expanding gasses are all behind the bullet, so the bullet is riding the edge of the gasses. So the first thing that’s going to come into contact with your finger is the bullet. It’s traveling at quite a velocity, and is quite a bit harder than your finger, so it seems that the bullet would (somewhat explosively) push your finger, or at least little bits of it, forward and out of the barrel. The bullet exits with reduced velocity because of the friction it overcame, and the gasses exit the barrel before the pressures get very high.
Where am I going wrong? Would the bullet not push the finger out? Would the time it takes to push the finger out delay the expansion of the gas by a tiny fraction of a second, but enough time to cause a rupture maybe?
The flaw in the logic SenorBeef is that things don’t work the same way at high speed as they do low. If that were the case there would be no danger in getting water or mud in a rifle barrel because the bullet would just push it out. In any event it wouldn’t be the bullet pushing the obstruction in front of it but a pressure wave from the compressed air between the bullet and the objstruction. With a finger type obstruction it’s possible you might get the chinese finger trap effect. The pressure wave would hit the finger faster than it can push it out of the way. The pressure on the finger caused it to expand to the sides plugging the barrel even tighter. That’s just a semi-educated WAG though.
As for the finger plugging the barrel it would all depend on lots of factors but we’ve pretty well determined an adult couldn’t fit a finger in in any common barrel anyway. I’ll leave it to someone else to do such experimentation.
since this is a top google result and nobody gave a solid answer for six years here you go … myth busters episode 43 … you will lose your hand.
Test 1 (gel hand): Buster’s gel finger was stuck inside the shotgun barrel. The entire hand was blown apart with no damage to the shotgun.
Test 2 (wax hand): They used a stronger ballistic hand made of wax to plug the barrel. The wax hand was blown apart but the shotgun barrel was ballooned slightly.
At this point they declared the myth busted and moved on to trying to replicate the myth. They wanted to get a ‘banana peel’ result by firing the shotgun.
Test 3 (dirt): Tory stuffed the barrel of a shotgun with dirt. The end of the barrel peeled back slightly, but the shooter was fine.
Test 4 (Steel spike): They welded a steel spike into the barrel. The gun shot the spike out with only minor damage to the end of the barrel.
Test 5 (squib load): A squib load is a bullet that doesn’t have enough gunpowder to exit the barrel. Jamie hammered a bullet into the end of the barrel. The end of the barrel bulged, but it didn’t banana peel.
Not only was this myth busted, but MythBusters failed at even replicating the result of this myth.
mythbusted While it was cool that they ballooned the end of the barrel, it didn’t explode, the hand was blown apart, and the shooter was safe.
http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2005/11/episode_43_seasickness_cures_f.html
I had a squib load myself while shooting a Sig 9mm. It was a combat drill and (if IIRC) the weapon jammed due to the lack of pressure to cycle the slide completely. I followed the “jam drill” and fired the next round. The slide locked about halfway back due to the now bulged barrel and both bullets were eventually forced out with a “ram” of some sort. Certainly no exploding gun.
So all they tested were shotguns? I call shenanigans. I’ve seen the results of firing a rifle with a plugged barrel twice firsthand. The barrel ends up looking like a peeled banana.
You’re thinking of Maverick (in which Gibson stars as the title character and Glover appears in a Lethal Weapon-referenced cameo).
To the o.p., no, a finger won’t cause enough of a blockage to prevent the bullet and exhaust gases behind it from exiting. A drop of water in the barrel of a rifle or musket, however, can be enough to jam the bullet against the barrel and cause it to bulge or split. Cannon shells may explode their charge for reasons previously indicated.
Stranger
I once knew a soldier who lost a finger while presenting arms. Nothing happened to his weapon.
What’s that thing you pull back on an auto handgun and then springs forward on a shot?
In a demonstration of Krav Maga (Israeli self-defense style) the guy showed–as an absolutely last resort Hail-Mary kind of move–to jam your hand between that thing and the end of its path.
The OP probably doesn’t have any fingers left by now, but as far as water goes:
WTF? Glock make an underwater firing pin?
I think it was Support Your Local Sheriff! and Walter Brennan was holding the gun and it was James Garner’s finger.
[quote=“PlainJain, post:37, topic:171958”]
Yes, it only takes a special set of spring cups to allow water to pass by the firing pin. It would still fire without them but the pressure in the firing pin channel would blow your hand off. They’re not meant for firing underwater, but for use in a maritime environment.
When I took a gun safety course as a kid, one the exhibits was a double-barrel shotgun that had been painted white–for a wedding to be borne by the ceremonial shotgun-bearer.
One of the barrels had a big blowout on it becasue IIRC enough paint had gotten inside the barrel to casue it to misfire when they later used it for hunting.