this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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No good marksman is carving anything on a bullet or casing. You want it to work. Carving the bullet means changing the ballistics, carving the casing means potentially making the round not chamber or having a misfire from a busted casing.
It's most likely a bolt action rifle, there's nothing to chamber here...
I think I know what you're driving at, but first let me address what you actually said real quick. A bolt action rifle does absolutely have a chamber, the chamber is the rearmost part of the barrel where the round sits and is held in place before firing. Its fitted to the specific round that the gun is designed to use to create a gas seal to ensure the projectile can be propelled down the barrel.
What I believe you were driving at is that, due to the chambering mechanism on a bolt action rifle being manually operated, as opposed to relying on the recoil action/gas discharge of the firearm to drive the bolt back and a spring to drive it forward, means that it less likely to jam or fail to seat. This is true, for a variety of reasons, but a bolt action rifle can jam, especially if you go futzing around with the casing or the projectile. You're less likely to see a stovepipe, I've only seen it when the case managed to fall back into the action instead of being ejected off to the side, but a complete failure to eject, a failure to seat or even a double feed are all possible 'jams' with a bolt action rifle.
Any idea what could cause a bolt to fly back when fired once and function properly in the future? We were all stumped
I can think of a few possible but highly unlikely scenarios for a typical bolt action rifle to do this, but nothing that would be easy to duplicate. Generally the bolt handle will be at least passively 'locked' in place by the geometry of the bolt and rifle, and sometimes actively locked in place. If the bolt handle isn't fully seated, there really shouldn't be a way for the firing pin to release. Wear and lack of maintenance could cause an issue like this, but I would expect the incident would be repeatable.
Pretty much the conclusion we came to, buy a lottery ticket it's more likely.
True, but you'd really need to jack up the engraving to get it to jam, and in a case like this, you're unlikely to need or want a second shot anyway. The only real reason to bring multiple rounds is in case of a misfire (unlikely to be caused by an engraving), because once you fire, you're running if you want any shot of getting away. So it getting stuck ejecting isn't really an issue, and that's already an incredibly remote chance.
And I don't understand how you'd double feed here. The shooter obviously had some training and was only going to take one shot anyway.