h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have been watching the CSI shows with a kind of morbid fascination.

Tonight's episode pulled a concept out of far left field as far I was concerned.

"sympathetic discharge"

They had a .22 snubnose revolver of indeterminate make that held eight or nine rounds in the cylinder.
The cylinder seemed to retract toward the recoil shield when the double action trigger was pulled. Or it was capable of being moved rearward with a finger while in battery. An odd feature that I thought was found only on old military revolvers like the Nagant.
They had a thing about "sympathetic discharge", two adjacent rounds going off at the same time and one going down the barrel and the other going into the air alongside the forcing cone and both rounds hitting the same target a couple of inches apart.

Now this is what bugs me about that. See if you think I'm too far off or wandering into esoterica:

1. Most .22 rounds are fairly consistent. They either go off or they don't and it takes a blow to make them go off. They are unlikely to go off without a blow unless there is a lot of heat in the area, but that would require a fire or the weapon having been fired dozens of times. I have not heard of any .22 cookoffs recently in a normal weapon. The possibility may exist in those full auto .22 replicas of the Browning and MG42 machine guns.
2. I have heard of handloaded supermagnum loads going off "sympathetically" when the setback from the recoil whacks a poorly seated primer into the recoil shield of a revolver.
3. I have heard of blackpowder revolvers, rifle and pistol, engaging in "chain fire", with all or most of the cylinders getting into the act.
4. If you have a cheap or poorly maintained eight or nine shot .22, such as the old High Standards or the Arminius versions of same, and the cylinder does not lock into battery, the possibility exists of two chambers being aligned so that they could fire their rounds into the edges of the forcing cone, but they would go left and right. This possibility does, of course, require a rather wide hammer or firing pin in order to contact both cartridge's rims.
5. If, as the script would have us believe, the second "sympathetic" round was shaved as it went past the forcing cone on it's way into the victim, the shooter and the pistol and immediate area should have had itty-bitties of burnt and unburnt propellant as well as pieces of the lead slug.
6. There's not much to a lead .22 bullet. And having splattered a many a lead .22 on resistant surfaces, I would dare say that it would have smeared itself along the frame and barrel long before it hit anyone.

http://www.firearmsid.com/Recalls/FA_Recalls%203.htm

A simpled search for "sympathetic discharge, revolver" turned this up.

Scared the everliving poop out of me!

While it's not exhaustive, it only listed one revolver warning for "sympathetic discharge", the Liberty in 1972. And you had to drop it.

My God, I've never been a fan of the Glock, but I had no idea!
I didn't know that they could be so easily modified to fire full auto.

I don't watch that show. It's the extreme sports version of crime scene processing. There's plenty of interesting stuff out there that you can do without a great deal of trouble, but that show is just crazy.

I had never heard of a sympathetic discharge until you mentioned it. I find the concept a bit hard to belive, but cheap guns can be unpredictable.

I don't know enough about the whole thing to say anything.

Sorry. I'm just not into guns. Now I wouldn't mind playing around with that Glock mod. That could be fun at the range, if I wasn't buying the bullets.

While I was searching, I ran across a bored cop site, Sniper's Paradise.

Apparently an incident had taken place where a police sniper with a .308 bolt action had shot a pistol in a potential suicide's hand from 60 odd yards out. No harm to the fellow and the weapon was disabled.

The boyos at the site got some evidence weapons, loaded them and starting banging away at 25 yards, because that was the range of the video camera.

Most of the pistols and shotguns they shot went off and some were still barely functional, including a semiautomatic pistol shot through the magazine with a .308 and a derringer shot with a .223.

Their conclusion, after all this goofing off, was that the fellow who did the real life shot was very lucky.

They also mentioned that in some states shooting a person to keep them from killing themselves is illegal.
Isn't an armed person an armed person, regardless of intent?

Police really hate it when people video stuff like snipers shooting the guns out of people's hands. It makes people ask officer who shoot perps center mass, why they didn't just shoot the gun or the knife. Because we shoot for center mass. It gives you the best chance of stopping the threat.

That being said, many officers who do get in shootings do wind up shooting the weapon that their assailant is holding. Officers focus on the weapon, and your bullets tend to go wherever your focusing. Especially since most police shootings don't involved aimed fire.

The average police shooting takes place at night, within three yards, in three seconds, and three rounds are exchanged.

>They also mentioned that in some states shooting a person to keep them from killing themselves is illegal.
Isn't an armed person an armed person, regardless of intent?

No. An armed person is only an immediate threat when they're doing something with the weapon. I've been in standoffs with armed people. However, I have never shot, because they never threatened me or someone else.

I'm pretty happy if a suspect has a gun pointed at himself. It makes it hard for them to shoot me. Now the second it starts to waive in my direction, I'll fire.

Of course, I'm talking about typical officers in standard situations. If you have a sniper and a guy with a gun, you might consider shooting to disable. Or in one of my standoffs, the SWAT team was coming down the yard with less lethal ammunition when the subject passed out.

I grew up in a small town in lower Illinois, Mt. Vernon.
I knew most of the officers by name.
Over a twenty year period, there were only two officer-related shootings. Both were self-inflicted. One of them was the Chief, after he lost the Super Bowl. One of his creditors was the Sheriff...


I kid you not.
The Sheriff, who'd been reelected for years, had been indicted twice during the seventies for football gambling. He had received a citation from the State once for shutting down a numbers operation at a string of truck stops...

One of the retired officers, the father of a friend of mine in high school, said in all his years as a prison guard on a road crew and his time as a local officer, rising to Captain (on a 14 man force), he only fired his weapon four or five times, at dogs.

I saw an old Roy Rogers movie the other night. While he did kill himself (it was a double role), he shot a pistol out of a man's hand across a table earlier.

I seem to remember the Lone Ranger doing that a lot.