According to this story, a sheriff’s deputy shot at an attacker, and the bullet from the deputy’s gun entered the barrel of the attacker’s gun.
I just can’t see this happening. Furthermore, the deputy’s gun was a .45ACP, while the attacker had a .40 S&W. (At least according to the news story. I wonder if they got these backwards.)
I can’t find the video at the moment but I seem to remember the Mythbusters testing this ‘myth’ and finding that it’s plausible, but probably much more than a ‘one in a billion’ shot. The difference in caliber isn’t that great and it would only take a fragment of the round going up the barrel to jam up the other weapon.
It is unlikely but not impossible. If the deputy’s bullet struct near dead center of the muzzle of the attacker’s gun, it could shed the copper jacket (I’m assuming the deputy was shooting JHP rounds) and the core could deform or fracture, continuing up the barrel until it reached the chamber. I’ve seen weirder things, including a triple ricochet that hit the shooter in the head hard enough to leave a big lump but not break skin.
Stranger
I’m not so much skeptical that it happened, the picture is convincing … I’d argue that “one in a billion” chance is a bit low … maybe more like “one in a trillion”.
I looked at the images but I don’t know anything about bullets. Not enough even to tell if the bullet in the bad guy’s gun was nose first or not. The bullet doesn’t look very damaged, so your point about the difference between calibers seems valid.
Wouldn’t a bullet hitting a bullet in the chamber set off the round in the chamber?
Regards,
Shodan
Not quite the same thing, but they have found several examples of ball ammo colliding in Civil War battlefields - two balls stretched past each other like rubber. (Skip the jokes.) It is sobering to think about the density of fire it takes to produce even one such example…
The picture showed the open chamber of the attacker’s gun with a lot of lead splattered onto the face of the chambered round. I think even if you have two guns of the same caliber it’s going to be a messy entry, since you’re not likely to get the two barrels perfectly aligned; the sharp edge of the barrel will shave some lead off of the incoming bullet, and the rest of the bullet will get mangled as it completes its journey down the barrel. With that in mind, an extra 0.050" of diameter on the bullet isn’t a big deal, since it’s going to get shaved down no matter what.
I’m not clear on how it actually disabled the attacker’s gun, since the picture showed what appeared to be a viable, unfired round in the chamber of the attacker’s gun. did the impact of the inbound bullet somehow unseat the chambered round, pushing it backward so that the firing mechanism couldn’t work properly?
I am not familiar with the minute details, but taking a pretty solid hammer blow on the muzzle would likely distract and disorient a shooter. That alone, or with some unintended reaction like throwing on the safety, might have kept him from firing.
I wouldn’t expect it to. A cartridge (meaning the whole piece of ammunition) has the bullet (the lead part) at the front, then a casing (usually brass) behind it filled with powder, and a primer (small round explosive thing) at the back. To fire, the gun has a firing pin (thin metal rod) that gets pushed by the hammer into the primer, which causes the primer to explode, which then sets off the main charge of powder. On most modern guns, the firing pin is designed to be well away from the primer unless the trigger is pulled to avoid accidental firing if the gun is dropped. The bullet coming down the barrel will impact the other cartridge, but won’t actually hit the primer or make the primer hit the firing pin, and modern gunpowder is actually quite hard to set off without a primer.
My hunch is no, which seems to be confirmed by what happened here. The primer on the back of the cartridge needs to be punched in its center to trigger the explosion. The firing pins in modern gun are recessed in the slide until they get hit from behind and pushed into the primer. The bullet entering the muzzle would have hit the loaded cartridge and pushed it back into the breech of the slide, but the firing pin would still have been tucked away safely and could not have come into contact with the primer on the cartridge. You might be concerned that firing the bullet into the muzzle would have pushed the gun/slide back far enough for the firing pin’s inertia to carry it into the primer and set it off. Even that seems unlikely to me. Depending on the model of firearm, the firing pin may have been locked in place in the slide to prevent its inertia from triggering the primer in the event the gun is dropped. So firing the bullet into the muzzle seems unlikely to set off the cartridge that already in the chamber.
It’s hard to estimate odds like this but I suspect it’s a lot higher in an encounter like this. You have two people at roughly arms length effectively trying to punch each other with guns. What are the odds their hands would hit each other? Sure, the timing and the gun orientation needs to be just right for one bullet to enter the other gun but I’d be surprised if something like this hasn’t happened before in similar circumstances.
[QUOTE=Amateur Barbarian]
I am not familiar with the minute details, but taking a pretty solid hammer blow on the muzzle would likely distract and disorient a shooter. That alone, or with some unintended reaction like throwing on the safety, might have kept him from firing.
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I think the bullet entering the muzzle moved the slide out of battery and kept the gun from firing again. Modern autoloading pistols won’t fire when the slide is out of battery. The blobs of misplaced lead kept the pistol from closing fully again, rendering the pistol completely unusable in the moment.
You can narrow down the odds. Start with the assumption that all of your shots are going to land in a 1 square-foot area, since you’re very close to your attacker. If you assume a 1/2" diameter barrel as your target, then your odds of getting one bullet to hit that target are roughly
144/(3.14*0.5^2/4) = 1 in 733.
IOW, if you randomly shoot a 733 rounds into a 1 square-foot target zone, you might reasonably expect to get one bullseye.
If you think 1 square foot is an unrealistically small target, then increase it. Keep in mind that one-in-a-billion odds would require an amazingly large spread of bullets.
Looking at the picture, I’d surmise we wouldn’t want to pull that particular trigger … that gun is fucked up bad …
Do you mean one in a billion shots? Why, then it would have been a common occurrence during WWII. I’m thinking one in a billion per year is generous. Has anyone ever heard of this happening before?
WWII had a number of sniper-shot-though-scope stories, instead.
Why did you use pi*r^2/4?
Also, I think one factor you are missing is the angle between the barrels which would further reduce the probability. The areas can be aligned, but if the angle is more than a few degrees, the bullet will glance off.
Machine Elf is assuming a probability given two targets in close enough proximity to reliably hit within a 1 foot radius, with barrels pointed at each other. That would be a much smaller subset of all shots fired in WWII.
I didn’t - I used pi*D^2/4.
We can haggle for a long time to come up with a more precise estimate, or a more specific definition of a “hit”, e.g. does it count if a tiny sliver of my bullet ends up in the attacker’s gun barrel. My general intent was to show that the odds are a lot closer to 1:1000 than 1:1,000,000,000.
NM. My mistake.
Another way to think of it - 1 billion is enough bullets to completely cover an area over 1 square mile with .44 bullet holes.
Excellent. Now, how far away does a handgun shooter need to be in order to reasonably expect a spread of 1 square mile? Not going to calculate this, but I’ll guess it’s several miles. That’s the range-to-target for which we’d expect one-in-a-billion odds of plugging your opponent’s barrel.
True … I withdraw my incredulity …
I once saw a picture in a history book of WW1 which showed a rifle where a German bullet did just that. It blew the top off the rifle.