You can't believe everything you read on the internet [insert giant duhhhhh here]. This piece originally ran on the SinistralRifleman Blog (written by Russell Phagan, a competitive shooter, RECOIL contributor, and all around nice guy) but we thought it was more than appropriate to address it here. Years back, he witnessed a catastrophic failure and took some pictures. This in itself, though unfortunate, isn't the story. The largely incorrect conjecture and subsequent rumors is what this is about. Without further ado, we bring you:

Internet Rumor Control: Epic KaBoom!



Hell, I was there…

They say anything that goes on the net will never go away. This is definitely true, In the past week an image of a rifle that suffered a catastrophic failure has gone viral. Again. Unfortunately when photos get shared the original story is lost and there is no context to what the viewer sees. A lot of internet experts have posited various reasons why it failed, most of them completely false. Perhaps the most absurd is that it was caused by firing .300 blackout out of a .223. At the time this occurred in December of 2010, .300 Blackout wasn’t commercially available. In an effort to set the record straight, here’s what occurred:





Background

Paul Shanks was part of the shooting team at Cavalry Arms Corporation (since closed,GWACS Armory now produces the CAV-15 MKII and offers service and support on Cavalry Arms manufactured units). He built a lightweight rifle on a CAV-15 MKII polymer receiver with these components:

Timney Trigger

9mm upper with gas tube hole drilled out (no forward assist or brass deflector making it the lightest he could get at the time.)

Young M16 carrier

Compass lake 18″ rifle gas SPR barrel, 1:8 twist 223wylde chamber

Miculek brake

Clark Custom Carbon Fiber Free Float Tube

He had used this rifle for some time at local and national level matches. The failure occurred at the December 2010 Phoenix Rod and Gun 3 Gun Match. On the close range rifle stage Paul fired 3 rounds and on the 4th round the failure occurred (interestingly, they did find all 4 holes in the paper targets). Karl Kasarda, who was running the timer, saw Paul’s hat fly off and at first thought it was muzzle blast from his brake that caused it. He (meaning Russell Phagan) was conversing with other shooters when he heard an extra loud muzzle report and turned in time to see the rifle fall out of Paul’s hand in pieces.

Paul was visibly shaken. He was checked him for injuries and fortunately had suffered no major hurt, though he did have some small scratches on his face and a fragment from the barrel extension in his inner forearm. He was wearing Oakley Half-Jacket glasses and while there was no visible impact on the glasses, Paul now uses glasses with more coverage for shooting.

The Damage

[Editor's note: Many more pictures at the original blog link]



The Cause

It wasn’t .300 Blackout in a .223 barrel. It wasn’t head space. It wasn’t “firing out of battery”. It was a binary charge in the cartridge of pistol and rifle powder. Pistol powder burns at a much more rapid rate than rifle powder. That created the over-pressure that caused the rifle to fail like this. Paul had purchased a lot of ammo from a commercial reloader. They had not sufficiently cleaned out the hoppers when switching from pistol to rifle reloading. Fortunately for the public, Paul had bought the entire lot. The manufacturer compensated Paul for the damage and the bad ammo.

We are supremely confident this will keep coming up every so often in the cycle of the internet. Please direct people here for the entire story. This is a cautionary tale for reloaders, and emphasizes the need to wear quality protective lenses.

Read the original article here: http://sinistralrifleman.com/2014/12/23/internet-rumor-control/

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So there you have it. You can't always believe everything you read. Be sure to visit Russell's blog here–he talks about a lot more than kabooms that happened almost half a decade ago.