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Is it safe to shoot fire extinguishers with an AR?

Well over a decade ago I was shooting at a club indoor range in Akron with my 1911 with .45 ACP 230 gr. ball ammo.

The only other people in the range was a young guy and a young lady two lanes down from me. He was familiarizing her with handgun shooting.

Suddenly he yelled "OW! One of your rounds just hit me in the shin."
He didn't even have a bruise.
Lying on the floor in front of him was a 230 gr. slug with a flat spot on the curve of the tip.
Obviously one of my rounds had somehow ricocheted back to the firing line.

I have NO IDEA what the bullet hit that made the flat spot or what it hit in the backstop to make it come almost straight back.

I carried that bullet around inside a .50 BMG spent cartridge in my pocket for years.

I can't count the number of times I've been hit by bounce backs while shooting falling plates and silhouettes. I switched to hollowpoints to stop it. That probably stopped 95% of occurrences. For years I had a burn scar from a .45 landing on top of my collarbone inside of my shirt.

AlanM wrote:Well over a decade ago I was shooting at a club indoor range in Akron with my 1911 with .45 ACP 230 gr. ball ammo.

The only other people in the range was a young guy and a young lady two lanes down from me. He was familiarizing her with handgun shooting.

Suddenly he yelled "OW! One of your rounds just hit me in the shin."
He didn't even have a bruise.
Lying on the floor in front of him was a 230 gr. slug with a flat spot on the curve of the tip.
Obviously one of my rounds had somehow ricocheted back to the firing line.

I have NO IDEA what the bullet hit that made the flat spot or what it hit in the backstop to make it come almost straight back.

I carried that bullet around inside a .50 BMG spent cartridge in my pocket for years.

Theoretically that can't happen, yet..it did. Hence why I go ape-scat as a range safety officer when someone doesn't wear their eye protection.

Several years ago I was hit in the chest from schrapnel caused by my own round. Apparently I hit the metal holding the target. Never been back. Shoot outside at my daughters farmhouse now.

I was hit a couple times by 9mm rounds at Izaak Walton league practicing for bowling pin shoots. Yes, the eye protection is extremely important in these cases and most anytime you shoot.

Brian D. wrote:Theoretically that can't happen, yet..it did. Hence why I go ape-scat as a range safety officer when someone doesn't wear their eye protection.

Every time I've done a night fire exercise with tracer rounds, I am astonished at the way some rounds manage to defy physics.

Ricochets are common on old style indoor ranges that use a steel deflection plate to direct the bullets downward into a sand or water pit. They typically use a cloth (canvas?) screen in front of the plate to inhibit ricochets. If the screen isn't changed diligently, the holes created by the bullets get to a size where the bullets can pass through them unimpeded. This [and atmospheric lead issues] have caused a shift toward ranges using rubber pellet backstops, either with conveyor belt material in front, or with long, sloped rubber piles. North Olmsted Sportsmans Club uses the former rubber system, requiring periodic replacement of the rubber sheets. Since they switched to that system, lead ingestion issues have declined dramatically.

I was once shooting on the range on Pearl in Medina(?) when I was hit in the back of the hand by a piece of jacket material that literally stuck in my hand. The wound wasn't deep. I pulled the jacket out, washed and dressed my hand and continued shooting. The issue was insufficient maintenance of the bounce back screen.