#firearms reference

There seems to be a trope that when a child plays with a gun they end up shooting themselves or someone else. But how about writing when they do so, can they hurt themselves because of recoil or got their fingers caught in the slide? That never tends to happen, but that is totally possible right? Or at least combined with shooting themselves/someone else? Though I can get recoil/slide injuries being ignored and waysided by the seriousness of getting shot.

That’s not a trope, that happens. Roughly thirteen hundred children die from gunshot wounds in the United States each year. Somewhere just under six thousand are treated for (and survive) gunshot wounds. Now, only about 6% of those deaths (and, I assume the injuries as well) are accidental (the rest are a mix of homicides, suicides, and assaults.)

There are a non-trivial number of non-self inflicted, accidental firearms injuries and deaths where the shooter is a younger child.

If I seem hostile, here’s my problem, this isn’t “a trope,” this isn’t, “a plot contrivance.” This is something actually happens in the real world. Much like drunk driving, it is something where it tends to be more lethal in fiction than reality, and I’m fine with that.

Much like drunk driving, these shootings occur, more often than not, from adults being irresponsible, and there is a serious possibility that someone will end up dead.

Note that I did not say the victim’s parents are responsible. In the US, roughly 40% accidental firearms deaths occur at a friend’s house. (Strictly speaking, I’m being a little more general with this, the exact statistic is 40% of unintentional shooting deaths in the 11-14 age bracket.)

So, what do you do? Secure the gun. Do not “just” hide it. Hiding is insufficient, as roughly 3:4 children know where those firearms are concealed in their house.

Securing a gun means, get a gun safe. It doesn’t matter if you have a handgun, or a full arsenal. Get a safe. This goes beyond just the risk of a child getting their hands on the gun, as it also protects the firearm from theft.

Get and use a trigger lock. Yes, this is a belt and suspenders kind of situation, but it doesn’t hurt to do both. Especially if your safe is combination locked.

Store the ammunition separately from the gun, and keep that secure as well. This is just basic gun safety, but still. Also keep your ammo in a cool, dry location, as cartridges tend to degrade over time if subjected to humidity and temperature extremes.

Go by what the TSA says: If it fires a projectile, it is not a toy. That includes 6mm airsoft, 4.5mm air guns (including BB guns) and paintball. These are not toys, and there is a real danger of permanent injury from mishandling. (Fun trivia, I have actually checked an airsoft pistol through airport security. It was treated like a live firearm. I had to fill out all the paperwork, and storage had to comply with TSA regulations.)

Do not assume that a child will not play with a gun, or that they, “know better.” They will play with it. Guns are mistaken for toys in roughly 16% of accidental shootings where the victim is a child.

I said, I’m okay with shootings like this being presented as more lethal than they are in fiction. What I’m less okay with is the disproportionate representation of this as, “accidental shootings.” Most of the time, when a child is shot, they either did it to themselves intentionally, or were intentionally shot by someone else. As I mentioned earlier, only about 6% of firearms deaths among children arise from accidents. The scenario where a kid is playing with a gun, and doesn’t realize it’s not a toy is vanishingly rare. More often, and horrifyingly, they use the gun as designed.

Stepping away from kids entirely, there are a number of minor ways you can injure yourself while operating firearms.

The firearms community has the wonderful term, “Beretta bites,” which refer to injuries on the thumb, resulting from having the slide recoil into that digit during firing. (This will happen with most semi-auto handguns if you try to keep your thumb on the hammer while firing.) Usually, this refers to a specific pair of chunks taken out of each side of the thumb, and it’s immediately recognizable.

In most cases, these are going to be minor injuries. The kind of cuts you’d either allow to clot on their own, or throw a bandaid over. However, in some cases, these can be deep enough to requires stitches.

I’ve never seen anyone get scuffed from having their hand up by the slide during firing. Generally speaking, you’re not going to put your thumb up next to the ejection port simply because of the ergonomics. The way most handguns are designed, it’s more comfortable to put your thumb in line with your index finger. (If you do pull it back, you’ll end up behind the hammer and we have Beretta bites.) Your index finger and the side of your hand shouldn’t be near the slide, because your index finger would be on the trigger. (Technically, you could pull the trigger with your middle finger, but I doubt many inexperienced users would preferentially do this.)

It is possible to injure your offhand if you hold the gun incorrectly. There’s a lot of potential grips here, where, someone who didn’t know what they should hold onto could be hurt. Weaver and Teacup are the most likely grips, but those are pretty safe. Someone trying to emulate what they saw from John Wick could actually mess up their stabilizing hand by wrapping it around the slide. (Don’t do this.)

It’s also possible to snip your fingertips when the action is closing on some firearms. Dismantling some firearms can be hazardous if you’re don’t know what you’re doing, and I can think of a few handguns that can open up your fingers during reassembly, if you don’t where to put them. (Though, these are all pretty rare, and most of these are associated with disassembling the gun for maintenance, something that an inexperienced user is unlikely to attempt.)

Beyond that, it’s quite easy to burn yourself on a recently used firearm, if you don’t know which parts are safe to touch. (The severity of the burn will scale based on how hot the gun got, and how long contact persisted. This isn’t a serious medical issue in most cases, but you can easily suffer minor burns without much effort.)

It wouldn’t happen to a child, but you can pinch your fingers when you’re loading a magazine into some models of firearms. If the mag’s floorplate sits flush with the base of the grip, be careful. (The SIG Pro 2022 is on my shit list for the sheer number of times has clipped my pinky during reload. I eventually learned to either point my pinky straight away from the gun during a mag change, or completely shift my grip on the pistol during a reload.) The P99, and USP are both guilty of this as well. Oddly I’ve never had an issue with a Glock doing this to me. Even the 33, which uses the floorplate to add additional grip length (the exact same thing the SP2022 does.) Worth noting, every pistol mentioned in this paragraph has a polymer frame. It can hurt, it can raise a blood blister, but I’ve never had them draw blood from a fast mag change. (Also, for the record, I put an unnecessary amount of power into my reloads, I blame the 1911 I learned on. This is entirely a function of how much force the shooter uses when inserting a fresh mag.)

Shell casings can end up in unpleasant places. Again, you’re not likely to suffer serious injury this way, but you can end up with burns if it becomes wedged in your clothing, especially if the gun was under heavy use. (It’s the same thing, the risk of a serious burn is almost non-existent, but it can happen.) The only incident of scarring I’ve ever heard of from shell casings came from a service member who ended up with spent brass wedged under their armor in combat. That said, I have had a Ruger M9 knockoff throw casings at my eyes with enough force to damage my glasses. Eye protection is important.

One final consideration of injuries that absolutely can be sustained is hearing loss. Even under ideal circumstances, if you’re not using any ear protection around firearms, you will suffer some damage, and experience symptoms like ringing and headaches from prolonged gunfights. Again, if you’re going out on the range, wear ear protection.

One final danger can be easily overstated, but is worth remembering. Failure to control recoil on fully automatic firearms. There was a famous incident on August 25, 2014, where a 9 year old girl, at a Nevada shooting range lost control of a 9mm Uzi killing Charles Vacca, her shooting instructor. I’ve run across a handful of other similar stories over the years, including a military instructor in a former Soviet state, where one of his recruits had been messing around with his AK, lost control of the recoil and put a round through his head. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, seriously, full-auto is not a toy. It can be fun, but it’s not something you should ever hand to an inexperienced shooter. The risk something going wrong (however minor) is significantly higher.

If you get shot, triage isn’t going to care if you’ve got some minor bruising on your hand. That won’t kill you. There’s a lot of minor injuries that you can sustain from operating firearms, in most cases these don’t even rise to the level of complaining about it in the moment. If you’re bleeding it, clean it and throw something (sterile) on to stop the bleeding. You don’t want the chemical residues getting into the wound (even if it isn’t particularly dangerous.)

Of course, if you’re shooting recreationally and injured, stop and deal with it. Don’t just ignore it.

If you have kids, and you have firearms in your life, you need to take steps to ensure that you keep them separate, and the kids do not get access to the guns except under your direct supervision. It is your job to educate them.

At the same time, it is also vitally important for you to know if your children’s friends have access to firearms. Like I said, roughly 40% of children who are killed, die at a friends house. With that in mind, it is reasonable to require those weapons are properly secured and stored.

So, the short answer is, yes, adult or child, you can suffer minor injuries from operating a gun as intended. You can also hurt yourself in a multitude of ways that have nothing to do with being struck by a bullet.

-Starke

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Apparently there seems to be a wild consensus about guns that don’t have enough metal in them and sneak past metal detectors. Yes, no, in between. It seems all the fictional stories I’ve seen with such guns seem to be stretching plausibility or have enough sci fi or magic in it to make someone gloss over accuracy for cool mechanic. But what is it really?

It’s a myth. Or at least, it used to be, and now that it’s less of one, it may not matter anymore.

The major origin for this seems to have been the early Glocks. The Glock was not the first handgun on the market with a polymer frame, but it was the first to try to make that a serious selling point.

This lead to panicked speculation that the Glock could be taken through metal detectors. You can even see the extreme version of this in Die Hard 2 (1990), where the scriptwriters had it in their head that the Glock was manufactured from “porcelain,” and was invisible to metal detectors. The entire, “Glock 7” dialog is downright painful for anyone with passing familiarity with firearms.

It’s worth noting that the polymer frame does make the Glock considerably lighter than a steel framed pistol of that size. The other major solution that was being used were aluminum frame pistols, (like the SIG P226.) We’ve said it before, but weight is an important consideration for any weapon, and use of lighter materials like aluminum and polymers can be beneficial.

Also, while I’m not an expert on polymers, it’s worth noting that the Glock, technically, isn’t plastic. It’s a high-impact polymer that’s more closely related to nylon. Now, plenty of people (myself included) do sometimes use polymer and plastic interchangeably, but that’s not accurate. All plastics are polymers, but there are many polymers (both naturally occurring and synthetic) which are not plastics.

By weight, the Glock is over 80% steel. That’s a little misleading, because the polymer components are quite light, and the steel isn’t, but when you remember that the foil in a pack of cigarettes, or even your belt buckle can set off a metal detector, it illustrates how misunderstood the early polymer frame pistols really were.

For the time, the steel components in a Glock were necessary. You couldn’t replace them with polymer components and get a firearm that performed to the desired specifications. In particular, trying to use a polymer barrel would have resulted in a gun that would explode when fired. Even today, creating a polymer barrel is an engineering challenge. Creating one that will survive regular use is (probably) not possible with current technology.

Now, what really does exist are polymer combat knives. These will hold an edge, can go through a metal detector, and you can buy them for less than 20USD. (Less than half of that if you shop around.) Which part of why you probably haven’t been through a metal detector in the last decade.

As a technology, metal detectors are on the way out. Like many pieces of security technology, the metal detector came with a shelf life. They were designed to prevent people bringing contemporary weapons into secured areas, which lead to people developing weapons that could circumvent them.

In the last 20 years, there’s been a steady shift towards full body scanner technology. The big two are X-Ray scanners (both backscatter and direct transmission), and Millimeter Wave Scanners. These will detect polymer weapons.

Supplementing them is the old standard of a pat down search. It doesn’t matter if you have a space age gun that can go through a metal detector when someone can find it with the back of their hand while checking you for weapons.

Similarly, even if you did have a space age plastic gun, bullets and shell casings are still metal. They’ll still set off a metal detector, and they’d still show up under backscatter.

This also leads to the Defense Distributed Liberator. The Liberator is a 3d printed, single shot, firearm, which takes it’s name from FP-45 Liberator.

So, some quick history: The FP-45 Liberator was a single shot firearm designed by the US Military in World War II. These were crudely stamped steel pistols. They were intended to be air dropped into occupied France, where members of the French Resistance could capture them. The entire goal was to provide Resistance members with a weapon that could be used to kill an enemy and take theirs. To best of my knowledge, actual deployment of the FP-45 was extremely limited, and the only confirmed use of one was to assassinate a German police officer.

The Defense Distributed Liberator was designed around the idea that if you had access to a 3D printer, you could make a gun. The gun’s existence was more of a political statement than an actual tool for rebellion or defense. The end result is a firearm that could, theoretically, get through a metal detector (though the ammunition can’t), but it is also only as reliable as the material you print it out of.

When the AFT was testing the Defense Distributed Liberator, they used a variety of materials. Their tests with ABS-M30. resulted in a gun that was successfully test fired eight times. At which point, they declared the Liberator a lethal weapon. Some of their other tests resulted in catastrophic failures on the first shot.

While considering the Liberator a lethal weapon entirely valid, firearms usually measure their lifespan in tens of thousands of rounds fired. Breaking in a gun frequently involves putting a thousand rounds down range. Right now, it’s not possible to make a polymer barrel that will stand up to that level of stress while also delivering an acceptable lifespan. A gun is not useful if it explodes in your hand before you can empty a magazine, and that’s the problem with polymer internals.

So, the short answer is, even though there are examples, the plastic gun is mostly a myth. Even if you have a plastic gun, the ammunition would still set off the metal detector. Even if you could get around that, the gun would still be found with a simple pat down, and would show up in Millimeter Wave or Backscatter scanner.

The myth is real only in the sense that people believed it. It started with a misunderstanding about the Glock’s engineering by people who didn’t understand guns (and weren’t willing to listen to those who did understand the engineering), and it all went downhill from there.

-Starke

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Hi. Yet another gunfire question, actually two: 1) While ricochets can be just as lethal, are they more realistic for “flesh wounds” that don’t break (shatter) bones? 2) Looking at stats like muzzle velocity, many late 19th-century rifles seem roughly the same power as modern handguns of the same caliber. Can we use this to estimate what the bullets can or can’t do?

cathreese-blog-blog

I’m going to focus on a minor, but critical part of this question: Grazing hits from direct fire and ricochets are equally realistic. Both of these things occur. It’s not that they’re particularly common, but it’s no more or less realistic for a character to suffer a superficial injury from a gunshot than from shrapnel or a ricochet. These things happen.

With gunfire, a graze is one that doesn’t penetrate deeply. It may skim across the surface, though in some circumstances a bullet will skate across bone. The victim walks away with a minor injury

Of course, a bullet doesn’t need to break bones to kill you. A through and through that ruptures an artery is immediately life threatening. A shot to the lower abdomen is an excruciating way to die. Either of these can occur without any skeletal damage. If you get shot, you can bleed to death and die from, “a flesh wound.”

This is before you get into, “fun,” concepts like hydrostatic shock, which holds it’s possible to cause neural damage from suffering a gunshot elsewhere on the body. (Though, last I checked, hydrostatic shock was a disputed phenomena.)

While we’re on the subject, it’s worth reminding people that it’s quite easy to miss the fact that you’ve shot in combat. The adrenaline means your pain response is dulled, and your body doesn’t know what to make of a gunshot wound. This has a few implications:

First: You don’t know if you’ve received a grazing hit. You probably won’t find out until afterwards.

Second: It’s entirely possible to end up with shrapnel in your body that you don’t know about. This is unusual, but not particularly noteworthy.

Third: It’s possible to suffer a terminal injury and not realize it. You can’t feel the injury, and in the adrenaline fueled state your only warning is if you realize you’re bleeding heavily. It is entirely realistic for someone to just keep fighting until they lose consciousness and bleed to death.

The exception to that final point is if the gunshot does shatter bones. That is something you cannot ignore. It’s not a pain issue, you need your bones to function, break them and you’ll be unable to use those limbs.

As for 19th century weapons? No, not really. I’m not going to say it’s completely impossible to take a 19th century weapon and find some modern analogy. Physically, it’s the same principle; you’re ejecting a chunk of metal at your target, so, if the math lines up, all things should be equal. However, the engineering is entirely different. That engineering meant that 19th century weapons had a lot of issues we just don’t see anymore. Rapid fouling (the buildup of unburnt powder) isn’t an issue. Overpressurizing the chamber causing the firearm to explode is still technically possible, but you’d only see that with sloppy hand loads, faulty weapons, or loading the wrong cartridge into a weapon.

There is a significant difference in how you’d use a 19th century firearm compared to a modern one. Because reloading took significantly longer, you couldn’t afford to spray and pray, the way you can with modern box magazines. This means less bullets in flight, more focus on making sure those rounds connect.

So, can we compare 19th century firearms to modern ones? Not really. Even stuff like ballistic gel tests are going to be somewhat suspect. Just remember that any bullet can kill if it hits something vital.

-Starke

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How harmless or lethal are blanks? Would they still hurt you if you were to fire them from a close enough range at someone?

It depends on the ranges, but blanks can kill.

So, when we’re talking about injuries and deaths from firearms, the focus is, somewhat obviously, on the bullet. That’s reasonable, the bullet is the most dangerous part of the equation, but it’s not the only danger.

Gunpowder doesn’t, technically, explode, it simply burns very energetically. This means there’s a lot of hot gasses, and burning particulate matter ejected from the barrel. Anything that doesn’t make it out of the barrel (called fouling) needs to be cleaned periodically.

This is an important, and often overlooked detail, conventional firearms are dirty and messy weapons. Modern powders burn cleaner than black powder, but this is still nasty, corrosive, stuff. This is why cleaning your gun is important, and why guns became significantly more mechanically complex after the invention of cordite. As well as after each new iteration of propellants.

Gunpowder at the point of ignition burns somewhere north of three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. (Above 1800C.) Now, it doesn’t stay at those temperatures for long, but it does release rapidly expanding, extremely hot gasses. Those can result in severe burns, at extremely close ranges (read: several inches.) Pressing a gun, loaded with blanks against someone and firing it will result in some pretty horrific wounds. This is because the expanding gasses will be forced into the victim, resulting in a star pattern tear in the victim’s skin, significant internal disruption, and burns.

Second, the bullet is not the only projectile a gun will eject. Wadding will also be sent down range. In the case of shotguns, wadding is critical for getting the shot moving. However, in the case of blanks, the wadding is vital for keeping the blank from simply dumping it’s load out the front of the cartridge. This isn’t usually much of a consideration because it’s fairly light weight, and doesn’t tend to go very far before physics catches up with it, but if you’re struck by it when the gun is an inch or two away from your body, it’s still moving quite rapidly, and while the mass is quite low, it will still have some significant force behind it.

All of this is short range, gunshot burns usually end around 3 feet from the gun, though stray particles of burning powder can travel father. So, generally, blanks are, “safe” if you’re more than a few feet from the target. However, for something like a mock execution (where someone puts the gun to the back of another’s head), they can kill.

Unfortunately, there have been more than a few on stage deaths that were the result of actors fooling around with blanks. One example is Jon-Erik Hexum, who started playing Russian roulette with a blank cartridge on the set of Cover Up. The blank blew a hole in his skull, and the resulting bone chip was forced through his brain, killing him.

There are other tools to simulate a gunshot at close ranges, but it’s not as simple as loading blanks into a functional firearm.

Also worth noting that blanks can propel debris in the barrel with as much force as a normal gunshot. The common example are some nail guns, which use blank cartridges to propel the nail into wood.

The more tragic example is the death of Brandon Lee. While shooting The Crow, Michael Massee’s character used a .44 magnum revolver (a S&W Model 629.) The gun had been loaded with blanks. For the scene where his character murders Brandon Lee’s. The problem was in the prop.

The 629 had previously been used in a series of close ups. The production had created dummy rounds, but dismantling live .44 cartridges, and removing the powder, then reassembling the bullets. This left the primers intact. Something that is not an issue with commercially produced dummy rounds, that exist specifically for situations like this.

After shooting the close ups, the prop master dry fired the revolver before removing the handmade dummy shells, and never examined them to determine their condition. There’s so many things wrong with this, but I’ll condense to the important detail, the primer for the round in the chamber migrated the bullet into the barrel where it came to rest. After that, without ever inspecting the barrel, or really examining the weapon, the prop master loaded it with blanks.

When Michael Massee was supposed to fire a blank at Brandon Lee, the bullet in the barrel was ejected, killing him.

Blanks still simulate a gunshot. It’s, “safe,” if you’re careful. But, get close enough, and these can do some singularly horrific things.

If the point of the question was, “can people screw around with them and live?” Yeah, or they can die. There’s a range of possible outcomes, few of them pleasant.

If the point of the question was, “is there any truth to that, the actor gets killed by a blank?” Yeah, that does happen. With just enough frequency to be depressing. Brandon Lee’s death was tragic, but the number of moving parts that created that tragedy was unusual. There are plenty of actors, like Hexum, who have killed themselves or others by mishandling props because, “it’s just a blank.”

-Starke

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This is an incredibly bad idea for many reasons. It doesn’tmean you can’t have a character who does this, there are people out there whoengage in exactly this kind of behavior, but there some things you should beaware of.

Threatening someone with a weapon, even an unloaded firearmis a crime. This is called brandishing, and the laws vary widely betweenstates. Both the specific definition, and the severity of the sentencing. Insome states it’s a misdemeanor that will put you in jail for 90 days, in othersit’s a felony that will strip you of the right to vote or own a gun, andsentence you to at least 3 years.

Pulling a firearm will escalate the situation. This shouldbe fairly self explanatory: When you draw a gun, you’re announcing to everyone presentthat you’re willing to permanently remove someone from this plane of existence.The problem is, if you just pulled an unloaded firearm, that’s a threat you can’tmake good on. Doing this because you don’t have another option is a dangerousgamble. Doing this intentionally is stupid, and borderline suicidal.

Turns out, most people object to being killed, and many ofthem are willing to preemptively retaliate in self defense. They may haveethical or moral objections to the decision after the fact, but in the heat ofthe moment, they don’t want to die. In the face of someone who is fighting fortheir life an unloaded gun is an incredibly poor weapon of choice; especiallyif their opponent’s is loaded or they’re carrying a knife. Then, some people are just willing to risk attempting a disarm. If they manage to take the gun (likely since your protagonist can’t shoot them), turn it around and find it isn’t loaded? They’re going to get pissed off. If your protagonist was banking entirely on the idea that the gun would work, then it’s possible they’ve escalated the situation past the point it can be diffused. (That happened the moment they levered a gun at someone.)

The irony is, your character would actually be safer, andmore responsible, pointing a loaded handgun at people. They’re going to createa situation where (eventually) someone’s going to start shooting back. This isn’ta “maybe, someday” situation. Someone will look at your character’s gun, anddecide the appropriate response is to shoot them first.

As I said earlier, there is a place for this kind of a stuntin a story. But it’s not as a character’s normal modus operandi. This issomething they use once, to get out of a desperate situation when they don’thave any other options. Using this constantly will kill the tension… and thenyour character.

Someone who knows what they’re looking at may be able toknow your character is bluffing via a couple tells. I’m going to stress, thisisn’t a fully inclusive list, it’s just things that occur to me off hand.Cycling an empty automatic pistol will trigger the slide lock. On most modelsyou can manually hold the lock down, but this is visible. Second, with a littleexperience you can actually hear if the action is cycling a round into battery.

You basically cannot pull this with a revolver. While thechambered round isn’t easily visible, the next two rounds in the cylinder are, whichwill probably lead to awkward suspicions about the entire thing being empty.

It’s not a handgun, but, for the sheer intimidation factor, you can’t beat a twelvegauge at close range. Just don’t let anyone get a look down the barrel; theymight notice there’s no shell in the battery. This is a concern with handguns,but getting a clear view of the firing pin is slightly more difficult. With ashotgun you’re looking for a brightly colored plastic shell, and a borediameter that is much larger than a handgun’s. As with pistols, cycling anempty shotgun will sound slightly different from one that’s moving a shell intothe chamber. This is just a function of how the mechanical systems interact witha loaded gun. When those systems engage, you can hear it, when they don’t, they’renot there.

To be honest, I’m not entirely certain what causes theaudible difference. Beyond the unhelpful, “more things happen with a loaded gun.”It’s something I’ve noticed while shooting, but never really bothered toinvestigate.

-Starke

Most firearms should work in a burning building. There may be some edge case that won’t, but I can’t think of any off hand. That said, any firearm with an exposed powder pan (like a flintlock, wheellock, or matchlock) could easily discharge on its own, if a spark ignited the exposed powder. They’d still work, it just might be much sooner than you were planning.

I’m not sure about percussion cap guns, but they might have a similar issue. These had a nasty habit of chain firing, where the spark from one cap would ignite another, firing multiple rounds at once. This wasn’t a serious problem with pepperbox pistols, instead of one round, it would fire two or more. But it could be a serious issue with revolvers and turrets, where the extra rounds could strike the pistol or (in the case of turrets) the operator. I don’t know if flecks of fire hitting the caps will ignite them, but it is a real risk.

Bullets will discharge if sufficiently heated, called “cooking off.” For example, being tossed into an open flame or into a heated skillet will result in rounds igniting. (Don’t do this, seriously.)

Cooking off can also occur with a firearm that is substantially overheated. If the chamber is too hot, the firearm will cycle, the round will cook off, causing the firearm to cycle again. This is called a “runaway gun.” At this point the only solution is to keep it pointed down range until it runs dry.

It’s probably worth pointing out: Automatic firearms generate a lot of heat, and dealing with that is an important engineering consideration in designing them. Guns that will runaway after extended use are a real issue.

Taking a firearm into a burning building is, in general, a bad idea; much like going into a burning building.

Now, if the gun or ammunition is engulfed in flames, that’s a different problem. As I mentioned earlier, actually setting ammunition on fire will result in it discharging on its own. This is more likely to involve the rounds detonating in the magazine and shredding it, than the gun firing uncontrollably.

This is more of an issue if you’re talking about an ammo cache in the burning building, rather than something your characters took in. If your characters are carrying their firearms, they shouldn’t have any particular issues. At least, none that affect the guns before the smoke and fire finished off anyone left alive.

That said, ammunition left behind in a building would be a serious consideration for fire crews trying to deal with the blaze.

-Starke

The ones you’ll see in films and TV are, for the most part, blanks. These are cartridges that lack a projectile. They’ll have a full, or mostly full, powder charge, with some paper wadding to keep the powder in the shell before firing.

These are much safer than firing live rounds, for somewhat obvious reasons.

When you fire a normal, modern, cartridge: the primer detonates, igniting the powder, pushing the bullet into motion. The muzzle flash you see is burning powder escaping the barrel.

With a blank: the primer detonates, igniting the powder, ejecting most of the still burning powder down the barrel. Propellant that would normally be consumed pushing the projectile gets to wander free and burn in the open atmosphere.

At least, that’s my recollection. I haven’t spent much time with blanks, and all of that was with nail guns, so I could be wrong about exactly why this happens.

It’s probably worth pointing out that blanks can actually be quite dangerous at close range. The biggest risk is the burning powder. With a normal round, fired at close ranges, burning powder can cause minor injuries. Called “stipling,” this is often useful in establishing if the shooter and the victim were within a few yards of each other. It can also result in minor burns from a short range near miss.

With a blank, you’re looking at the entire load of powder being dumped into someone’s face, the burns can be nasty. It’s not quite the same as pumping a round into them, these burns can be lethal. At very close ranges, the kinetic shock from high power blanks can break bones. In some cases, the wading (usually paper or light plastic) can penetrate and function as an impromptu bullet.

Incidentally, you could scale back the powder to produce a more “realistic” muzzle flash. But, with any automatically cycling firearm, under-powered cartridges have a nasty habit of not delivering enough force to cycle the mechanism. A good example of this would be loading 12 gauge flare shells or dragon’s breath shells into a semi-automatic shotgun. The gun can fire them, but you’ll need to manually cycle it between shots, because neither produces enough force to actually cycle the action. This can also happen when crossloading rounds, like chambering a .380 in a 9x19mm pistol or a .40 in a 10mm pistol (do not try this, the results can be far worse than the pistol not cycling).

-Starke