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“We put up some steel targets and I was roughly 15 metres from the target. I took my first shot and it hit, then the second shot and it hit. The third shot was another hit, but I instantly felt the impact of the ricochet in the right eye of my glasses. It pushed the glasses back into my face. There’s a latch that holds my lenses in and it dislodged the lens. The bullet made contact and then ricocheted right off the glasses.”

Hill said he was firing a VZ 58 semi-automatic rifle with 7.62 by 39 mm soft-core bullets.

“It’s a 30-calibre bullet, high velocity, 2,400 feet (732 metres) per second. The impact when it hit me was about 1,000 feet (305 metres) per second. It’s never happened before (and) it’s rarer than lottery tickets.

“It was the jacket of the bullet, a large fragment of the bullet. It’s the hard outside shell of the bullet. Normally the copper jacket goes to the ground, but this time it came right back at me and hit me directly in the face.

He said that his safety glasses saved his eye, possibly his life. “It could have gone to any other spot, possibly my neck or my throat.”

He noted that the safety-glasses manufacturer is sending him a replacement. “They’re rated to take a .22-round straight on.”

bmorton@postmedia.com

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