Gary Reeder
Well if we are all telling on ourselves, here goes
Tuesday, December 08, 2020, 12:53

Years ago I did a lot of groundhog hunting, normally with Larry Farley with our "long" range rifles. Mine was a Remington 700 in 22-250 Improved. One fine day whilst I was meandering thru our favorite ground hog field I was by myself as larry was actually working for a change. I had bought one of the Thompson Center Patriot pistols. It is a single shot black powder pistol.

It is a 45 caliber single shot cap and ball. The area was full of ground hogs so I decided to give my new Patriot pistol a go.

Driving around the large field in my Jeep I had spotted several hogs but before I could get the gun cocked and out the window of my Jeep the hog was gone. So I decided to be smarter than the hog and cocked the gun and set it on the seat beside me. On one of the deeper ruts in the field the jeep bounced and the gun went off. The lead ball hit the steel of the firewall and bounced back and hit me just below the knee. I stopped the jeep and got out (actually pretty much fell out) expecting to see half a leg and everything below the knee gone. I yanked up my jeans leg and was very surprised to see the leg intact, although there was a bloody small circle where the round ball had hit. Shortly after that I sold that pistol and have never ventured into black powder since then.