Am I the only one who sees this as stupid?

[drache]

back in highschool there was a kid who during the middle of a math test had a .22 round in his hand and was tapping it against the desk (boredom) and the thing went off. Missed the teachers head by about 2 feet who was sitting at his desk marking homework! Scared the manure out of us all! Seems the .22 was in his pocket left over from hunting at his parent's farm and out of boredom he started tapping it on the desk which was enough to set it off!

And I must admit as a kid I took apart shotgun shells for the gunpowder. Finally my dad got so sick and tired of the shotgun cells going missing he bought me a can of gunpowder to play with!

 

[Eagleye]

back in highschool there was a kid who during the middle of a math test had a .22 round in his hand and was tapping it against the desk (boredom) and the thing went off. Missed the teachers head by about 2 feet who was sitting at his desk marking homework! Scared the manure out of us all! Seems the .22 was in his pocket left over from hunting at his parent's farm and out of boredom he started tapping it on the desk which was enough to set it off!

I'm sceptical. Tapping a round on a wood/composite desk, even on the rim of a rimfire, is unlikely to set it off. I'll give the benefit of the doubt to the poster, though....maybe this was a very sensitive 22 round. However, the "tapper" would have been in far more danger than the teacher. In any case, the bullet would not have been the projectile, but the case could have flown like a projectile when the discharge separated it from the much heavier bullet. Having that round in his hand when it went off could easily have broken the skin on his fingers quite badly.
I recollect as a youth being involved in some mischief with loaded 22 rimfire rounds. Myself and a couple of other guys put several 22LR rounds in a vertical bank [just pushed them into the dirt], then stepped back about 15 feet and shot at them with our Daisy BB guns. When you hit one, it made a good "bang" and we would laugh a bit, then carry on. Well, one of my buddies hits one, and the next thing we know, he is rolling around on the ground, holding his belly with both hands, screaming his head off "Ive been shot!, I've been shot!" We finally got him calmed down enough to get a look, and he has a round red mark, exactly the diameter of a 22 LR case rim, on his belly. It did not even break the skin, just made it very red. It had hit bare skin just below his tee shirt and above the top of his jeans. On inspection, the rounds that we had hit had left the lead bullet in the bank, and the cases were being projected back fast by the powder charge. One of these had found the belly of my pal. We abandoned that practice right then and there.
Regards, Eagleye.

 

[drache]

I'm sceptical. Tapping a round on a wood/composite desk, even on the rim of a rimfire, is unlikely to set it off. I'll give the benefit of the doubt to the poster, though....maybe this was a very sensitive 22 round. However, the "tapper" would have been in far more danger than the teacher. In any case, the bullet would not have been the projectile, but the case could have flown like a projectile when the discharge separated it from the much heavier bullet. Having that round in his hand when it went off could easily have broken the skin on his fingers quite badly.
I recollect as a youth being involved in some mischief with loaded 22 rimfire rounds. Myself and a couple of other guys put several 22LR rounds in a vertical bank [just pushed them into the dirt], then stepped back about 15 feet and shot at them with our Daisy BB guns. When you hit one, it made a good "bang" and we would laugh a bit, then carry on. Well, one of my buddies hits one, and the next thing we know, he is rolling around on the ground, holding his belly with both hands, screaming his head off "Ive been shot!, I've been shot!" We finally got him calmed down enough to get a look, and he has a round red mark, exactly the diameter of a 22 LR case rim, on his belly. It did not even break the skin, just made it very red. It had hit bare skin just below his tee shirt and above the top of his jeans. On inspection, the rounds that we had hit had left the lead bullet in the bank, and the cases were being projected back fast by the powder charge. One of these had found the belly of my pal. We abandoned that practice right then and there.
Regards, Eagleye.

I was in the class room when this .22 went off and the mark is still on the wall at the school (Maple Drive Junior Secondary School in Quesnel, BC). All he was doing was tapping the .22LR on the metal section of his desk and then all of a sudden it went CRACK and we heard the the round hit the wall.

My cousin stuck a .22 round into the ground when he was a kid and hit it with a rock, the round went off and he got a chunk of lead in his nose for his troubles. Still has the scar to this day.

 

[pharaoh2]

A bullet fired from a rifle travels foward because it is lighter than the rifle. A lead slug is heavier than the brass case. IF a .22 case were to discharge by tapping it, I can only assume it was being held by the thumb and forefinger. Probably not being held too tight either. I would also asume that if the primer ignited the case would likely be spit back, and the lead slug would just kind of pop out, but without sufficiant force to cause any damage. And that's assuming that the primer could be ignited in that manner at all. I've had sharp but weak firing pins fail to fire, even though they sounded stiff enough. But what do I know?