Have you ever been shot?

General General Discussion
1

I have mentioned a couple of times that I have been shot mainly in connection with gun safety discussions. It’s a hell of a credential for such discussions, when you reprimand someone for a safety problem and they want to argue, showing them a bullet wound pretty much ends the argument. That is if they are even remotely teachable.

Another member asked the circumstances of my getting shot and I thought it might make an interesting topic of discussion.

In 1976 I was 19 years old, in college and an active cyclist. I was riding my bicycle home from school, down McDuff Avenue in Jacksonville. Down the road a man ran out of the Pony Liquors, carrying a gun in one hand and a cloth bag in the other. I was astonished at how fast he was running, I had never seen anyone move so fast. Moments later another man emerged, also armed and began shooting at the fleeing man. He fired 13 shots from his Browning HP rather wildly and the 10th or 11th shot, I heard my bicycle go “clang”. I thought “that son of a bitch shot my bicycle!” The shooter then went back into the bar. I got off my bicycle and quickly located the bullet strike which left a big 'ole dent in the seat tube. Strangely, there was blood and meat fragments splattered on the tube as well. I’m puzzling over where the blood and meat came from and I feel something squishy in my left shoe. Red stuff. “Wonder what that is?” “Blood.” “I wonder how that got there?” It was amazing how long it took me to put these little clues together. Then I noticed the nasty gash in my leg, just below my calf. Shortly, the police arrived. They thought I was the robber and roughed me up pretty good. After about 20 minutes I was released and rode my damaged bicycle to St Vincent’s ER. Of course they called the cops. The officer that responded was the one that beat me up. He laughed. I laughed. The guy that shot me was the husband of the bar owner and completely judgement proof. The medical treatments cost me $7K at a time when that was a hell of a lot of money. And I paid it. And someone stole my bicycle. It was not a good day.:sad:

This was the second major misfortune in my life, the first being the death of my father a year and a half before. The lesson I learned from these two events was to maintain good cheer even in the face of adversity.:jester:

This was actually the third time I had been shot, the first, I shot my own finger with a BB gun, the second, during a dove hunt, someone shot me in the back from about 50 yards.

2

You’re a bullet sponge.

3

Yup, I’ve been shot as most of you know.

4

That’s so incredibly messed up.

5

…

6

I’ve never been shot, but I have been shot at.

Every muscle in your body tightens up.

7

I got shot in the leg back in 2004 near Mosul. It was probably a PKM round, since our vehicles were being raked by two of em, but the other bad guys were using AKs. I was part of a low profile advance party, checking out a route before the client visited a FOB nearby.

Here is the pic I took during the ambush. I couldn’t shoot out of the car, and thus had nothing else to do while my buddy was patching up my leg. It was a kodak moment for sure…

Here is where the round came through a small gap in our armor.

I was extremely lucky and was able to sneak back to work in only three weeks, though the wound didn’t heal till a year later. I consider this a rather minor event for me, but three of my buddies got it worse, yet we all lived. It was an SOP changing event for me, since I ran out of bandages and had no tourniquet at that time.

Now, I never go anywhere without a med kit, especially if firearms are involved.

8

Iraq Ninja, glad you all made it through. Thanks for taking the time to share that.

9

Not that bad. The only thing he wounded was my pride. He was doing his job. I took up with him years later and we became buddies. He passed away recently.

10

WTF?!?

If that happened today you’d have owned the bar, the police station and possibly been able to sue the bicycle manufacturer somehow.

A few observations:

Amazing that the 9mm was stopped by something as simple as your foot and a bicycle bar. There are a few folks that would have you believe the “mighty 9mm” will penetrate anything and everything.

I don’t even want to get into the action of the responding officer due to “LE thread” considerations but I am stunned that the bar owner was judgment proof. I’m all for shooting at the bad guys but IF you happen to hit a guy on a bike that is your bullet and your responsibility.

And while I “thankfully” have never been shot I have my own gun safety story. When I was a kid I never completely understood how anyone was “accidentally” shot. All the “I didn’t know it was loaded” stories never made sense to me.

From the time I was handed my first firearm I was taught a firearm protocol that required you to check the action each and every time you receive or hand over a firearm. This meant if my father handed a gun to me and I looked at it and handed it back to him the action was visually inspected four times. I simply assumed everyone did this.

Then one day when I was about 12 I had some friends over with a new kid who had never seen a gun before. I was showing him my WWII guns and handed him a Gew 98, before I did I checked the action in a brief movement that he probably didn’t even notice. And before I could stop him he leveled the gun with the barrel pointed directly at my chest and pulled the trigger. Of course he was looking at the gun and not where it was pointed.

It was then I finally understood how these things happen and I finally understood just how incredibly ignorant some people can be with respect to firearms. If I had stored that gun loaded (as some people do) I would have been instantly killed from a close range 8mm shot to the chest. I couldn’t believe anyone would be so stupid as to point a gun at another person. I couldn’t believe anyone would be so stupid as to pull the trigger on a gun they didn’t intend to fire. Of course I’m amazed that he didn’t even ask “is it loaded” before he did any of those things but that is just a level of relative stupidity that happened that day.

And it was from that day that I finally understood the value of my fathers instruction on a very personal level, if the gun had been loaded it would have saved my life. And there have probably been at least two dozen times since then when I have been handed a loaded weapon and didn’t find out until I checked the chamber (usually to the owners surprise). I only wish it was a much more common practice.

11

LE was a bit more “hands on” in those days. I went to a lawyer who quickly discovered several unpaid judgements against the guy who shot me, he told me we would win but collect nothing. An acquaintance was a Marine guard at the Cecil Field Yellow Water Weapons Area. He was shot in the chest by a fellow Marine with an M16. He was back on light duty in a month. He was very lucky, the bullet entered between ribs and missed everything vital. The guy who pulled the trigger went to prison.

12

I kinda got shot. I was hit in the left hand in 2003 by a large bullet fragment.

Right after we took baghdad we were driving around looking for HVTs. We went to a cul de sac type street in Bagdad that had several large houses. We had run out of shells for the shotguns weeks earlier so we were breaching door locks with our rifles. My squad leader shot the lock on the front gate of one of the houses and the bullet basically exploded. A large portion of the core and some of the copper hit my left hand between the pinky and ring knuckle. Went in pretty deep but I was able to pull it out and bandage my hand.

Funny thing was the guy we were looking for, some sort of nuclear scientist, was just waiting in his living room and when we entered the house told us in perfect Brittish English “You could have knocked, I have been waiting for you”.

Apparently the guy spent most of the 60s, 70s and 80s living in England and returned to Iraq just before the Gulf War and was stayed to try and help the people.

13

I’ve been peppered by shotguns before and have had a few bullets travel by closer than I’d prefer - but luckily never hit by anything significant enough to cause any more damage than superficial.

Not sure you can call a bb being shot, hell we had bb gun fights as kids and I probably have a number floating around in me to this day. :stuck_out_tongue: Still have a scar on my right side from some gay asshole shooting me as a kid with a pellet gun.

I’ve always wanted the experience to know if what friends have described is bs or the real deal but have never had the balls to take a hit just for confirmation :wink: I guess I’ll just have to be hole free for the time being.

14

Haha… I feel your childhood pain Mr. Smiles. I always hated that rat bastard that showed up to the BB gun wars with the Benjamin. I have a bb deep in my hip when he went with the 8th crotch assisted pump from hell.

15

I loved it when I got my first pump rifle :smiley: Kicked the red ryders ass, might have been slower on the follow up shot but the first shot usually took the poor bastard out.

But I was referring to the gay (he was a flamer) neighbor who shot me one summer morning, we use to cause shit for him and tee pee his house etc, I guess one day he decided he had enough of us midget bastards from hell :smiley: He moved shortly after that, probably why he did it, figured he’d be gone and wouldn’t have to deal with our shit any longer.

16

My story isn’t nearly as good as some of the others that I know some guys have around here.

I took a .22 to my thigh 18 years ago. I lived in a shitty part of town when I went to college, and some asswipe got in an argument with another asswipe about a block away and started shooting at him with a .22 rifle. I was walking out to my car when I heard a smack (didn’t hear the gun go off) and felt my thigh go numb. I had shorts on, and I looked down and there was white stuff (fat and tissue, I guess) and a little blood running out of the hole about 5 inches above my knee. No exit wound.

I ran back into the house and called 911, then drove myself to the hospital after looking around outside to see if I could see where it came from. I knew it wasn’t close because I didn’t hear it. By the time I was about halfway to the hospital (10 minutes after the hit) it started hurting like hell. I hobbled into the emergency room and told them I’d been shot, and they freaked right the fuck out, threw me on a gurney and whisked me back into the room. Turned out the bullet went through my quad and was in whatever the muscle is that’s behind it and toward the inner thigh. They got it out. I was sore as fuck for a couple of weeks, and I have a little scar that was pretty red for a while but now has faded to a pucker where no hair grows.

Of course the cops came to the hospital and took a statement, and then they told me they’d caught the little shithooks. the one who did the shooting was a juvenile, so whatever they did was not enough.

Anyway. I have paresthesia (numbness) on the outside of my thigh about the size of a cantaloupe that never really came back.

ETA pic: Since the color is gone it doesn’t look like much. If I get a tan or a burn it stays pretty white, which is the only way you notice it normally. If you look closely, you can see a slice going away from it where they opened it up a little bit to clean it out.

17

I had a true “Doh” moment when I was about 16-17 yrs old. A bunch of us were shooting in an old clay pit and someone had left a big sheet of bank glass out there so I decided to see what kind of pattern I would get with my shotgun “facepalm”

Right after I squeezed off a round I got hit by several impacts that hurt like hell. Thankfully I was wearing eyepro and it was only 20g !!

I had several nasty welts on my chest,abs, and a little scratch on my neck. More importantly I had a big scrape across the right lens on my eyepro and that could have been a serious problem.

Man did I ever feel stupid after that one. I was 17 and indestructible !!
Good learning experience for me though, “stupid hurts” :smiley:

S.M.

18

Sort of.

When I was 15, we had recently moved into a house which we were remodeling. Being on the border of the country and the suburbs, we had a big trash pile that we burned our trash and remodeling refuse in.

On one occasion, my brother and I were told to go clean out the basement, as it was about to be carpeted. Just a day before, they had been installing tack strips for the carpeting and, being a concrete-floored basement, they had used a .22 caliber blank stake-driver to install the tack strips. Being good little boys, we went downstairs and cleaned out all of the junk and took it outside to burn.

Unbeknownst to me, my brother had taken a handful of .22 caliber blanks from the basement, along with some almost-empty bottles of compressed CO2.

We took the trash outside and tossed it on the trash pile, which was already burning. A minute or so later there was a rather large “BOOM!” followed by what felt like a concussion. A few seconds later, a burned and blown-apart CO2 can fell out of the sky, still smoldering. I looked at my brother, who grinned and said “I threw 'em all in there. I also threw those bullets in there!”

Right as the words left his mouth, there was another “BOOM,” then another, followed by “CRACK-Whizzz!” sound. Immediately I felt a burning sensation on my forearm. I thought it was a mosquito or some insect bite, so I instinctively swatted at my arm without looking at it, only to feel it hurt even more. I then looked down at arm and saw a red, quarter-inch sized circle, surrounded by blistered skin, with the following words in the center: “WINCHESTER SUPER X”

Apparently, one of the blanks had cooked off and blasted out of the fire, contacting my arm rim-side-first, a good 10 yards away. I should have been mad, but at that point in time, it was one of the coolest things I had witnessed in my long 15 years of life. I just stood there, speechless, looking at my branded arm.

There was then another “BOOM!” followed be several more exploding blank rounds, at which point we both ran like heck back to the house before our parents found out.

Sadly, the mark healed over, but I still have the story to tell (and my brother manages to retell it at every Thanksgiving dinner).

19

Incredible. I personally think if you can’t pay in money, then pay in jail time. What a suck situation.

20

Have you ever been shot?

Yes.

A .45 ACP FMJ came through a car door I was standing behind in the parking lot of our apartment complex and hit me in the leg. It didn’t do any real damage, in fact I never went to the hospital for it. All it did was leave a ragged hole in my left thigh down to the femur and then fall out. It didn’t really even hurt that much, nor did it bleed; it just oozed clear liquid. I only knew I had been shot because I felt a solid thud on my leg and when I moved to looked down the bullet fell out of my pants. Wound healed up and left a nearly circular mound that was initially purple and is now white. It took several months for it to close completely. It’s now kind of hard to tell where it is.

No teachable moment. I never heard a gunshot and I never saw the weapon (or shooter). The neighborhood wasn’t that bad, but it was declining and we moved out of NOVA shortly thereafter.

I was 13.

ETA: There is almost no deformation of the slug, just the grooves from the rifling and some nicks/scratches on the nose.