German soldier shot in Texas battle according to a Rushin news report

[branch37]

Just for the record, I'm not trying to discredit anyone that was there, or what the reports say.  I'm just discussing my experience with blanks.  But you are correct.  I would guess at any range greater than ~20 yards you probably wouldnt even need stitches from a blank.   

[FLOOB]

Blanks are dangerous in other ways because in some peoples mind they turn the gun into a play thing as happened in the original subject of this thread. In my home town two fools were playing around with a shotgun and blanks, one of them decides to slip in a live round to prank his friend with the kick. Guess how that ended. Remember the news story about the french soldier who sprayed a crowd with what he thought was a magazine of blanks? Bottom line, militant nerds need to take a lesson from sword and sorcery nerds. That is, if you're going to have pretendsy play time don't use real weapons. That is the exact purpose and reason why toy guns are made.

Also, and this is irrelevant to my point, blanks made to be used with blank adapters in military excercises are much weaker than blanks designed to be used without a blank adapter. As the blank has to have sufficient power to cycle the weapon without the aid of a plugged bore. So it is concievable that like the french soldier, the person in the original article of this thread may not have realised he was shooting live rounds until it was too late.

[PR3D4TOR]

Never point a real gun at at anything you do not want to shoot. It's the most basic gun safety rule there is. Guns used in reenactments should be converted to blank firing only, or use replicas.

[eagl]

Could have been anything.  Some guy "accidentally" loading up his live ammo that was still in the bottom of his ammo pouch, a "blank" that had been loaded with a bullet hidden inside the crimp, or an outside player who saw the re-enactment and decided to throw some live rounds into the mix (aka the grassy knoll theory).  The surrounding brush visible in the picture would make this possible...

When I was growing up, our school was going to take a class trip to see the play "of mice and men".  Unfortunately one of the lead actors got killed on stage when a stand-in doing the "shoot the guy in the head" scene pointed the gun point blank at his head instead of just to the side.  To their credit the troupe postponed a few performances and then the show went on a few weeks later, so we got to see the play a month or two later than originally planned.