Got up early this morning and went to the range while the sun was still in the Northern portion of the sky. At the Range you face east. Some guy came along, and you could tell he had not been there before, and was lost. I walked over and explained how things worked, as for going down range and setting up targets. He had no targets, nothing but an old auto loading pistol and some ammo. The pistol looked like an old H&R autoloader in .32 ACP. The guy did not have a clue as to how to load it, or do anything with it. He handed it to me asking how to open it to load. Closer examination, it was a J.C.Higgins. The guy told me his father had passed and he had gotten the pistol from the estate.
I removed the magazine and at that point he wanted it back. It was plain he wanted no other advice or information from me. So I went back to my bench and settled down to shot my 25-06 Handi. I looked over in that direction a few times but he was muddeling through. Just as I was settling down for a shot I heard a BANG followed by a scream. Then I saw the pistol flying out in front of the yellow line towards the ground. When the pistol hit the ground it went off again. I dove for the ground. This guy was huffing and puffing, and holding his hands between his legs. Then he started swearing, and yelling his head off. I realized the pistol was inert, and all firing had stopped. I went out and picked it up the pistol. It had not picked up the next round properly and was jammed. Something was stuck in the slide. I removed the magazine and ejected the stuck round. Noticed blood and what looked like skin in the back of the slide. I put the pistol in my hip pocket and went to see what all the cussing was about.
The guy was asking if anybody had a handkerchief, or a first aid kit with bandages. I walked over and told him I had a first aid kit in my truck, and for him to follow me. When we got to my truck I opened the First Aid kit and put on a clean pair of plastic gloves. I got out some wipes to clean off the blood to see what had happened. It took a bit of coaxing for him to give me his hand so I could clean it, and see how bad it was. As I cleaned off the end of his thumb I realized the hard object I was wiping was the bone. All the soft tissue was gone. From just above the joint, everything but the bone gone. The bone had some real bad cuts in it.
While I was cleaning it some young Army Troops came over to watch. The guy wanted to drive himself to the hospital at Ft Wainwright. Those troops took charge, good military training there. They flat told him he was not going to drive. They took his keys away from him, and gave him a choice of leaving his car there or letting one of them follow them to the hospital. He had no choice but to ride in the truck with the one taking charge. Two of them litteraly carryed him to their truck, while the third one followed to the car. I gave the pistol to the driver of the truck, and told him it belonged to the guy. Off they went to the hospital.
While I did not see it, it's obvious what he did. He fired the pistol with his thumb up on the back of the slide. Pistol fired, slide came to the rear pushing thumb back. Then thumb came forward up under the slide. Slide closed, usually trapping end of the thumb. Man they do a lot of screaming when someone pulls the slide back to free the trapped thumb. Appearently this guy jerked hard enough to tear the end of his mutilated thumb off.
