internal failure of the primer

[smoothoperator]

I got this from a friend. It seems to check out.


In September last year a Gwinett County officer was involved in a situation which quickly became a use of deadly force incident. When the officer made the decision to use deadly force, the chambered round in his duty pistol did not fire. Fortunately, the officer used good tactics, remembered his training and cleared the malfunction, successfully ending the encounter.

The misfired round, which had a full firing pin strike, was collected and was later sent to the manufacturer for analysis. Their analysis showed the following: "...the cause of the misfire was determined to be from the primer mix being knocked out of the primer when the round was cycled through the firearm multiple times". We also sent an additional 2,000 rounds of the Winchester 9mm duty ammunition to the manufacturer. All 2,000 rounds were successfully fired.

In discussions with the officer, we discovered that since he has small children at home, he unloads his duty weapon daily. His routine is to eject the chambered round to store the weapon. Prior to returning to duty he chambers the top round in his primary magazine, then takes the previously ejected round and puts in back in the magazine. Those two rounds were repeatedly cycled and had been since duty ammunition was issued in February or March of 2011, resulting in as many as 100 chambering and extracting cycles. This caused an internal failure of the primer, not discernible by external inspection.

[Heartland Patriot]

Now THAT is something unusual...it makes sense, but I certainly wouldn't have thought of it. You learn something new every day.

[Jumping Frog]

He is probably lucky that it didn't fire. At least the "Tap, Rack, Bang" drill got him back in the fight.

That many re-chamberings, I would fully expect significant bullet setback. If it had fired and gone KABOOM instead, he may have been hoping for a BUG.

[MoJo]

Never, never, never repeatedly rechamber the same round. I have three carry magazines, I chamber the top round from mag #1, remove it and replace #1 with #2 take the rounds from #2 and put the round that was the chambered round on the bottom. Next time I chamber the top round from #2 replalace #2 with #3 etc. It's a slight pain to strip a mag and do the rotate bit but, I'm worth the trouble.