Mild steel, construction plate, an old shovel blade… these dent, crater, and pit. And a dented, cratered, pitted surface is exactly what sends fragments flying back in directions nobody planned for.
Here’s a quick true story from an outdoor gun club years ago. Somebody was shooting, unknown to the rest of us at the time, a square steel plate about a hundred yards downrange. After the incident, when we looked at the thing, it was exceptionally thick and heavy steel. It just wasn’t hard enough because it was old scrap.
Anyway, to make a long story short, amongst the scattered shots from up and down the line, we heard a high-pitched, high-speed whizzing sound go right over our heads into the woods back behind the parking lot, which was behind the firing line itself. Yep, a 180-degree ricochet. It was pretty clear by the sound that if that had hit somebody on the firing line instead of flying over our heads somewhere, it would have penetrated skin and bone with lethal energy. That thing was moving. A straight back ricochet like that sounds impossible, but it is absolutely not. It can, and it does happen, and in this case, a pitted steel plate was responsible for sending a rifle round right back at the line.
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