Essential Gear for the Firearm Range—Eye Protection, Part I

Protecting your peepers is as much a component of firearm safety as keeping your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.

Wearing eye protection might not seem intuitive if you’re new to shooting firearms, but it’s every bit as important as wearing hearing protection. Let’s talk a bit about why and, in our next column, we’ll examine styles and tips for finding the eyewear that’s right for you and how you spend your time on the range.

Things That Can Go Wrong

The mechanics of a firearm are relatively simple, but that doesn’t mean that things can’t go wrong. That’s not meant to intimidate or scare you. It’s just a fact. All things mechanical are prone to failure. That’s the nature of the beast. In that vein, just as you buckle your seatbelt every time you get in your car as a safety precaution, warding against something going wrong with your vehicle or another vehicle causing an accident with yours, eye protection is one of the “seatbelts” of shooting.

What can go wrong with a gun? The two things you’ll be most concerned with when handgun shooting are the occasional weird extraction of a brass case in a semi-automatic, and the grit and grime that accompanies firearm shooting no matter where you are or what type of firearm.

Semi-automatic handguns are designed to expel the case of a fired cartridge off to the right of the ejection port. Occasionally, an extractor can get out of alignment and toss a case back toward you. On indoor shooting ranges, the cases can also bounce off the lane dividers. Those cases are hot, which is why most ranges want you to wear closed-toed shoes, and you certainly don’t want one to hit your eye. Eye protection guards against that problem. (Also, for the record, no low-cut or unbuttoned shirts. Ask me how I know this.)

When it comes to tiny matter floating around on a shooting range, both indoors and out, it’s everywhere: unburned powder flakes, minute bits of lead and copper from bullets, bullet fragments that blowback from a bad hit on a target stand or track-run holder instead of the target, dirt and dust on outdoor ranges, etc. Some of these are less of a problem on indoor ranges where air handling systems constantly flow in fresh air from behind the firing line and draw it downrange, mitigating lead exposure to shooters on the line, while shooters on outdoor ranges have more of a challenge with changing wind directions. Regardless, the kinds of particulate matter endemic to shooting and their ability to find your eyes occur with all firearms, and, so, eye protection is the solution.

Catastrophic Failure

As with anything mechanical, catastrophic failure can happen. With firearms, such failure is almost exclusively ammunition related.

The most common problem you might encounter is something called a “squib round.” A squib occurs when a cartridge lacks powder or enough powder to fully send the bullet down and out of the gun’s barrel, and it presents the opportunity for catastrophic gun failure if you’re not paying attention.

Image courtesy of Brownells, Inc. Twitter via @thebiguglyone

Most people encounter a squib round with reloaded ammunition. We’ll cover much more on that subject in the future, but to provide a basic understanding of the process, people who reload their ammunition take the brass cases of rounds they’ve previously fired and fit them with a new primer, powder, and bullet. Sometimes the reloading press (another machine, so, yup, things can go wrong), will fail to drop the proper powder load into the cartridge before it gets topped with a new bullet. When a person attempts to fire that cartridge, the ignition of the primer can be enough to start the bullet down the barrel, but not enough to send it downrange, so it gets lodged within.

Squib rounds can also happen with a bad primer, which may burn enough powder to start the bullet down the barrel but not enough to fully send it out. Primer or powder problem, the result is the same: a bullet stuck somewhere in your gun’s barrel.

Even when wearing the strongest hearing protection, you should recognize the sound of a squib load. There’s a “pop” from the primer ignition, but you’ll be missing the distinctive “crack” of a properly fired round and you’ll have almost none of the recoil of a properly fired round. You might even hear a whining, whistling, or hissing sound. In a semi-automatic handgun, the gun will almost certainly fail to cycle, i.e., the slide will not return to the rear and the fired case will not eject. Therefore, in most cases, a new round will not be loaded into the chamber. In most cases. Even if you think the gun has cycled, stop—stop, stop, stop, stop, stop—the minute you hear anything different from the normal “crack” of a properly fired round and do the following:

1. Continue to grip the firearm and keep it pointed downrange, finger off the trigger, for a full 60 seconds. Sometimes what sounds like a squib may actually be a “hang fire.” A hang fire occurs when there’s a delay in ignition of the powder in the cartridge, and that means the possibility remains that ignition will complete and propel the bullet forward. This is why you do not set the gun down until that 60-second count is up.
2. If you’ve counted to 60 and the gun has not fired, keep the gun pointed downrange and:
   • For a semi-automatic, remove the magazine, rack the slide to the rear to extract any case in the chamber, and lock the slide to the rear. Insert a small penlight into the chamber so that it can shine up the barrel—no light coming out means a bullet is stuck.
   • For a revolver, open the cylinder and empty the chambers. Keep the cylinder open and use a pen light or bore light like this one here, inserted into the rear of the barrel (inside the frame) and see if light appears coming from the muzzle. If you can’t see light, you have a stuck bullet.
   • Find a range safety officer or on-staff gunsmith who can help remove the stuck bullet without damaging the barrel.

Image courtesy of freerangeamerica.com/SCS Training LLC Facebook

While both squib loads and hang fires are usually blamed on handloads, they can happen with any ammunition, including the highest-quality factory ammo, in any firearm. All around, they’re very, very rare, but you do need to know how to deal with them because, if you shoot often enough for long enough, you’re going to encounter one, the other, or both eventually.

What does any of this have to do with eye protection? If you miss the signs of a squib or hang-fire, fail to check your barrel for an obstruction, and then fire another round, damage to your gun will occur that will range from significant to extreme and irreparable. On the low end you’ll have a bulged barrel that will need to be replaced by the factory or a competent gunsmith. On the really, really bad end, the gun—rifle, shotgun, pistol, revolver, or single-shot—is going to come apart, in your hands, right in front of your face. High-quality eyewear, designed for shooting sports and with impact-resistant lenses (and often frames), is what stands between your healthy eyes and painful injury or blindness.