Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Hang fire while hunting

Scary situation last night. Sitting in the stand and decided to fill a doe tag. I had a nice doe standing in my food plot that I had been watching. I decided I was going to shoot her as she was the biggest of the group. 75 yards perfectly broadside, I settled the crosshairs right in the crease behind her should and lightly squeezed the trigger. I heard the dreaded CLICK, I immediately came off the gun thinking to myself, how did I forget to chamber a round! I slid the rifle off my shoulder and under my armpit when BANG. I sent a round flying into the air. My finger was out side the trigger gaurd, gun off my shoulder. The delay between pulling the trigger to the gun firing was an honest 2-3 seconds. I’ve been shooting rifles for 25 years and never had that happen.

The gun is a Ruger M77 .243 tang saftey.
The ammunition was factory Federal Vital Shock 90gr Noslers.

Uggggghhhhh, that sucks.

I'd get the gun to the range and shoot some more of that ammo - hopefully just a bad primer and a sample of one.

Lots of possibilities – could have some gunk in the firing pin assembly too (making for a weak primer strike).

Had that happen with the muz ldr once on one of the biggest bucks I ever saw

Nearly all the times that has happened to be I traced it to colder temps and thickened grease in the firing pin channel.

Might be worth pulling your firing pin and cleaning out any old lube/grease.

The gun is being retired to the cabin until after season when I can get to a range. Luckily I always bring a backup rifle to deer camp

Exactly what first came to my mind. About 25 to 30 years ago my dad went to shoot a doe and had a .35 Rem round click on him in his 7600 pump on an absolutely brutal cold day. He knew it was loaded and thought the firing pin might be froze up, so he kept the rifle benched on the front log of his deer fort, pulled the mag, got back on the doe which hadn’t run very far off, took his Bic and held it lit up in the mag well, and about 20 seconds later…BOOM. Dead doe! Just one of many “I can’t believe he did that” moments in the 30 years I was blessed to hunt with him.

Glad you or anyone else didn’t get hurt! Definitely something very unnerving and in need of figuring out. Good luck, be safe, and happier hunting!

I’m glad you guys said that I never would have thought that. It is down in the 20s here and I had been sitting for about 4 hours.

A finishing nail in the hole in the end of the firing pin will allow you to screw the firing pin out of the bolt. Degrease and reinstall.

Another hack if you don’t want to disassemble your bolt: Remove the bolt and soak it in a pan of Coleman fuel for an hour or two, slosh the bolt back and forth in the pan and observe all the gunk that came out of your bolt. Then let it soak a while longer and repeat. Sling out the excess camp fuel and let it air dry and reinstall. The Coleman camp fuel will leave a tiny residue to prevent rust. I never oil a bolt on a rifle.

I use Dri-Slide, which lubes and protects without any gunk. IMO, a totally dry mechanism might get wet and freeze and maybe rust later.

Good emergency hack. Never used it, or had to, but I use Eezox or CorrosionX. I think there are other dry-to-touch cleaner/lubes too. Rem oil??

Had it happen this year opening day of Muzzleloading season but not that long a separation. I heard 2 pops instead of one and missed a nice buck. He stood there and watched me reload. When I started to put a new cap on he and his buddy just hopped into the woods.

Back in the early '70s( I think it was Colorado's first modern muzzleloader season), two friends and I were deer hunting in NW Colorado. I had shattered my lower leg in a ski accident that previous spring, and had just got out of my 3rd cast two weeks before our hunt, so I was walking slower than my buddies. We were all using percussion cap rifles, and it had been drizzling rain with the only thing to get under was a tall sage bush.

Shortly after the rain/drizzle quit, I jumped one of the largest antlered mule deer that I have ever seen in the wild. The buck was only about 30 yards from me when he jumped up and started bouncing away, and I shouldered my rifle and fired. CLICK, pause, BOOM! And he disappeared. I then heard a shot from the direction my partners had done, and a few minutes later, another shot.

By the time that I got to my partners, they were standing over the dead buck. He was in full velvet which made his antlers look bigger.

When we examined the bullet holes, there was one hole behind the buck's left shoulder, one hole through the hock of his right rear leg, and one hole in the right side of his heck, that killed him.

I was the only one to shoot at the buck's left side, and we found my patched round ball in his chest, but it had only hit one lung. One of my partners had shot the hole in the buck's hock as the buck had jumped a barb wire fence, and that same partner made the neck shot when they found the deer stopped and coughing blood from the lung shot.

I had been shooting a lot of Trap that summer, and luckily my shotgun shooting follow through had transferred to my shot at this running buck.

My partner that had also shot the buck had a sporting goods store in town and he wanted to put the antlers on the wall in his store. So we processed the meat, and I went back to college with one box of meat, I left the antlers and one box of meat with my friend.

The next summer I went back to Steamboat where I had a summer job, and the first thing I did was to go into my friend's store, and I didn't see those deer antlers. When I asked my friend where the antlers were he said they were back at the shed at his house. When I went to his house, the antlers were laying on the roof of his shed. They had been there all winter. I was supprised that a dog or other animal hadn't pulled them off and eaten them. Most of the velvet had pulled away from the antlers. The box of cut and wrapped meat that I had left with my friend was still on a shelf in his shed, and bugs had eaten the meat.

So I took the antlers home, stripped the velvet that was still on the antlers, and stained them. I was going to do a shoulder mount myself with another cape, but I never got it finished, so 30 some years later I took the antlers that I had put on a forn and a cape to my taxidermist, and he finished it for me. Back when we shot that deer, we rarely took a camera with us, so the only picture that I have of it is of it on my wall: