If a 150 Gr 30 cal FMJ Bullet is traveling at 3,000 FPS......

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  • cobra

    Ultimate Member
    Feb 26, 2009
    2,058
    White Marsh
    Never had a problem up our range in W V with steel at 300 yards

    but I can tell you shooting bowling pins at 10 yards with 45 acp. Had rounds bounce back and leave mark on my safety glasses or , bullets lodge in plywood behind me. Round was almost pristine enough to be reloaded due to low velocity.

    Never had a ricochet from steel at 50 or 300 yards shooting center fire rifles.
    At 23-3200 FPS can’t imagine piece of fragmented bullet making it’s way back to shooter
    At least we never experienced a ricochet at those distance,s
    We shoot AR rated steel.
     

    Pinecone

    Ultimate Member
    MDS Supporter
    Feb 4, 2013
    28,175
    I shoot steel matches all the time. Sometimes you get hit with little pieces but its like knats biting you. The worst time was after a match when a few friends and I swapped guns and were shooting some of the stage steel and a friend was shooting my G34 and I was standing directly behind him. A bullet jacket that had flattened into a shiriken came straight back right past his head and stuck in my nose. I put a napkin on it and stopped by the range office to pick up a couple of band-aids and went home. I was out the next weekend at another match. Hard to keep a band-aid on your nose. No big deal in my book. That is why you wear safety rated glasses. In the summer I usually wear tactical shorts and whatever shooting jersey is appropriate for the match.

    There was a case back in the early to mid 90s of a fatality at a USPSA match.

    Jacketed round hit the steel, the flattened jacket went over the berm into the next bay and hit a child in the neck, cutting the jugular.

    VERY unlikely set of events.
     

    Occam

    Not Even ONE Indictment
    MDS Supporter
    Feb 24, 2018
    20,239
    Montgomery County
    Almost all the bits of jacket and lead I've ever had connect with me while shooting at steel matches came from stages on either side ... up, over the berm, and back down. Never the whole projectile, just some spalling. At a match the other day, a buddy got a small piece to twap his neck - and that DID come back from the target. He was probably 30 degrees off from the shooter, and what got him was a small piece of lead. The target was a shoot-through flapper, and the round clearly caught the edge of the hole and the splatter did some crazy stuff in that cavity, including kicking a piece back around 30 degrees. Left a welt. Would have really sucked if that caught an unprotected eye, no question.

    But the straight-back-at-you thing is extremely unlikely. Nothing involved is elastic enough in the ways required to make that happen. Up high, and arcing back down? Far more conceivable (and a lot less energetic).
     

    erwos

    The Hebrew Hammer
    MDS Supporter
    Mar 25, 2009
    13,866
    Rockville, MD
    I've seen dudes get cut up a few times from spalling at matches, classes, etc. Some of them bled pretty good, but they weren't going to die. Always carry band-aids in your kit... not as sexy as a good TQ, but infinitely more likely to be needed. Wrap-around eye protection is also no joke.
     

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