I had an old break open single shot .410 shotgun at one time. If I recall correctly, I had to manually cock the hammer after loading it.Heartland Patriot wrote:Seems to me, from what I remember, that hammerless break-open shotguns cock either on opening or closing, but are indeed cocked when you close them back up...and with a round in the chamber, MAYBE if it hit right, it could go off. I remember having an old H&R 20 gauge single shot when I was a kid, but it had a hammer and a "half-cocked" notch or safety catch...I know I dropped it while it was loaded a couple of times and it never went off, but that was on dirt or grass, or mud, and not a hard floor in a house. I was given that shotgun when I was a younger teenager, maybe 14...and I went all over the brush country where we lived with it, shooting rabbits, and quail and dove during the seasons, (and rattlesnakes, too)...but I never "played" with that shotgun. I learned gun safety from my Dad at an even younger age (thank you Dad) and I have done the same with my own children in regards to gun safety. Sad business, indeed.
No one wins on this one, at all.
It did have a floating firing pin, but with that arrangement, it would be hard to come up with a scenario to impart enough energy to the pin to fire the shell in any manner other than being struck by the hammer. Jarring the hammer off the sear from a fall would certainly be possible, and I never tested that because I didn't cock it unless I was planning on shooting it right then. I suppose it could happen if the gun were mounted in a vertical rack of some type and it was driven over a rough road, duplicating the issue Steve described with riot guns, but that would be a most unusual way of transporting it.
In the case described in this post, if the "dropped gun" account is true, I figure most likely the hammer was jarred off the sear by the impact and there was no effective half cock notch to catch it before it hit the firing pin.