Firsthand account of a person shot with an air rifle

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JohnOD

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Sep 10, 2023
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Fifty years ago, I was shooting with some friends when a 14 YO boy… let’s call him Fred was accidentally shot in the back of his calf with a Sheridan 5MM blue streak. I was 16 YO when this happened. The gun had eight pumps in it and the muzzle was probably less than 2’ from the guy that was shot (I didn’t see him get shot as my back was turned but I was less than 10’ away when it happened).

How it happened is a complicated story that I don’t want get into here but rest assured there was some poor gun handling that led up to the incident.

So, I heard the gun discharge and turned to see Fred on the ground in the fetal position clutching his calf and sort of kicking with his good leg spinning around.

I knew he was shot so I pinned him down and pulled his hands away from his calf. The bottom of his pant leg was soaked in blood. I pulled his pant leg up and saw that he had arterial bleeding coming from the meaty portion of his calf. Every beat of his heart shot a squirt of blood out a good 12” or so. I looked for an exit wound and there wasn’t one but I could see the grey pellet just under his skin. I lightly ran my hand over it and could feel it.

I kept direct pressure over the wound to slow the bleeding and we got Fred to the hospital to get patched up.

Don’t remember much about how Fred was treated but later he did mention they used some sort of a pipe cleaner to clean the wound.
 
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In the '70's my friends and I were walking side by side when one brushed the trigger of his fully pumped Benji sending a .177 pellet straight into the side of the knee of the boy beside him. There was little blood but immediate pain, redness and swelling. We all panicked over the sight of the hole because we knew how deep our pump guns could bury a pellet in wood and we were sure he was a dead man walking because he was going to get lead poisoning. The walk home was painful and he had little recollection about the surgery to remove the pellet and clean everything up but he was back at school that week with stitches and a little limp.
 
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I wonder sometimes how any of us survive growing up. Probably like many folks, I had a close call once with a gun, luckily no one was hurt, but it sure reinforced to me the importance of safe gun handling. Although experience is the best teacher, you don't want to hurt someone to learn a lesson. I grew up without formal instruction in safe gun handling. My dad was not a hunter or shooter, so I learned from friends and their dads, some good, some bad. Now that I'm retired, I have thought of getting involved in some junior instruction at our gun club. That might be a way to help someone avoid a very preventable accident. I know it sounds trite, but still true, there is no calling it back once the trigger is pulled (or otherwise discharged).
 
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elh0102 said:
I wonder sometimes how any of us survive growing up. Probably like many folks, I had a close call once with a gun, luckily no one was hurt, but it sure reinforced to me the importance of safe gun handling. Although experience is the best teacher, you don't want to hurt someone to learn a lesson. I grew up without formal instruction in safe gun handling. My dad was not a hunter or shooter, so I learned from friends and their dads, some good, some bad. Now that I'm retired, I have thought of getting involved in some junior instruction at our gun club. That might be a way to help someone avoid a very preventable accident. I know it sounds trite, but still true, there is no calling it back once the trigger is pulled (or otherwise discharged).
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*** I wonder sometimes how any of us survive growing up. ***

Yes, true. Retired as well so I know what you are talking about. We learned from our mistakes and the mistakes of others - what was smart to do, what the limits were and what was stupid.

My concern is with all the younger generations who have little or no real world experience. I watched some "Funniest Videos" and "Fails" and was appalled that many adults have no idea that wet surfaces are slippery, thin ice doesn't support a lot of weight and full grown adults should stay off of toys designed for 30 pound kids.

People don't even recognize their own physical limitations. In many videos the people were very lucky not to get seriously injured or even killed... guess that there are plenty of times people do get killed but they can't show that on YouTube. Maybe the should show people who don't survive their stupidity as a caution for others who should know better.

You can learn a lot from the internet but it is not a substitute for for personal experience.

Sorry to the OP for getting distracted!

Cheers!
 
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PoohBearSniper said:
Brutal way to learn about gun safety. Did your friend(s?) continue on with airguns after that incident?
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On and off Pooh. I've just recently gotten back into airguns this past year and am having a ball with it. The ability to mosey out to the garage/shop, open the doors and shoot on my property is hard to put a price on.
 
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On a humorous note, my wife told me that when she was very young, she asked for and received a BB gun at Christmas. She promised her Dad she wouldn't shoot her brothers. It wasn't long and she was making one of the brothers "dance" as she directed the BB gun toward him. She claims she didn't know the BB gun was loaded, after she shot her brother in the stomach. The BB gun wound up broken in half and in the trash a short time later. She still misses her BB gun.
 
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The father of my best friend through my teens and early 20s shot his older brother’s “eye out” with a Daisy Red Ryder (or whatever they called the equivalent back when it happened) as a kid. It occurred when he picked up a rusty and dusty one they found while exploring an old house attic, pointed it at his brother, and pulled the trigger. The gun had apparently been left up there cocked and loaded for many years. The one eyed brother got his revenge a year or so later when he somehow managed to run his little brother’s hand over with a lawn mower, inexplicably removing the ring finger while leaving the rest intact. As horrific as those two incidents were, they were far from the worst. I’m no stranger to upheaval, but the tragedy that followed that family around makes me fee like I live a charmed life to this day. And to think that I used to routinely crawl into a private plane with my aforementioned friend and his father as the pilots…
 
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Heck, when I was a young, dumb kid (before I became an old, dumb man), us kids used to deliberately shoot at each other with BB guns playing “army”. I still have a small hard knot in my forehead from a BB that stuck there. I once stuck a Crosman 760 directly on my brothers “love handles” and pulled the trigger. Seems like it went in about an inch deep, if memory serves correctly. Talk about a butt whooping’ when Dad got home!
 
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I've got 4. 2 required surgeries and one ended in tragedy. My own was a ricochet from my brother that hit me in a leg, stung but just led to lessons learned.
My sister on the other hand had my dads antique Daisy that was cocked by pushing the barrel in. She tried unloading it and stopping the BB with her finger, got some stitches and a scar. I got in trouble for not keeping a closer eye on her.
A close friend and I were years later were shooting our Crossman pumps into a box of magazines to catch the BBs on low pumps. He too decided to catch a BB with his hand to unload rather that just shoot the target. 2 pumps on a Crossman 760 will go all the way through a 13 year olds hand FYI.
The last one was awful. The owners a hardware store in town bought their twin sons a pellet rifle to share, bad idea. The two were fighting over it one day. Happened to be loaded and went off. Shot one of them in the heart. He didn't make it. I tried finding the newspaper article for this one but it predated the internet and had no luck.
 
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IndyDurtdigger said:
I've got 4. 2 required surgeries and one ended in tragedy. My own was a ricochet from my brother that hit me in a leg, stung but just led to lessons learned.
My sister on the other hand had my dads antique Daisy that was cocked by pushing the barrel in. She tried unloading it and stopping the BB with her finger, got some stitches and a scar. I got in trouble for not keeping a closer eye on her.
A close friend and I were years later were shooting our Crossman pumps into a box of magazines to catch the BBs on low pumps. He too decided to catch a BB with his hand to unload rather that just shoot the target. 2 pumps on a Crossman 760 will go all the way through a 13 year olds hand FYI.
The last one was awful. The owners a hardware store in town bought their twin sons a pellet rifle to share, bad idea. The two were fighting over it one day. Happened to be loaded and went off. Shot one of them in the heart. He didn't make it. I tried finding the newspaper article for this one but it predated the internet and had no luck.
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Wow! That is tragic, and so sad.
 
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IndyDurtdigger said:
I've got 4. 2 required surgeries and one ended in tragedy. My own was a ricochet from my brother that hit me in a leg, stung but just led to lessons learned.
My sister on the other hand had my dads antique Daisy that was cocked by pushing the barrel in. She tried unloading it and stopping the BB with her finger, got some stitches and a scar. I got in trouble for not keeping a closer eye on her.
A close friend and I were years later were shooting our Crossman pumps into a box of magazines to catch the BBs on low pumps. He too decided to catch a BB with his hand to unload rather that just shoot the target. 2 pumps on a Crossman 760 will go all the way through a 13 year olds hand FYI.
The last one was awful. The owners a hardware store in town bought their twin sons a pellet rifle to share, bad idea. The two were fighting over it one day. Happened to be loaded and went off. Shot one of them in the heart. He didn't make it. I tried finding the newspaper article for this one but it predated the internet and had no luck.
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Last one is especially sad. The other stories also quite rough -- just thinking about one blowing directly into my hand makes me cringe.
 
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Lazarus Long said:
Sad to say, my brothers and I used to shoot at each other with slingshots and large, dry, tapioca. Dang that stuff hurt. Young people do stupid stuff.
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My brother and I used to use action figures to kick a marble around as a soccer ball, facing each other directly with our legs as the goal; the goalie was a beefier action figure. I don't know that we ever got welts, but that game definitely hurt.

Someone we knew and his brother used to play paintball. I'm pretty sure it operated on a Co2 tank; in any case, they were screwing around and eventually the tank went off and embedded itself halfway through their bedroom door. Would have loved to see it.
 
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Lazarus Long said:
Dirt clod fights, anyone? After a field is freshly plowed the dirt clods are just about fist sized. We used to have dirt clod fights. It was all good fun until someone got hit in the head, then it was a war. Gotta love dirt clod fights!
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Yep. We used the lids off of the old style galvanized trashcans everyone used to own as shields. I got one stuck on my hand once when the handle bent under the impact of a football sized (well, from memory more than 50 years old it seemed football sized) dirt clod thrown from the top of a dirt hill our "platoon" was "storming" in an effort to take it. That same 50 year old memory has it that it was thrown downward from a two handed, over the head hold, by a girl who couldn't have weighed 60 pounds. Good times!
 
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