As a buddy of mine said after - it was a stupid mistake and he'll never do it again.
‘Reminds me of a story I heard about an actor in the 80’s’
Jan Erik Hexum, I believe...
“What he didn’t realize was that the wadding alone for a blank in a gun that size is sufficient to kill you.”
Isn’t that how Bruce Lee died?
“Reminds me of a story I heard about an actor in the 80’s, who was fooling around with a .44 magnum revolver loaded with blanks. He put it to his temple and pulled the trigger. What he didn’t realize was that the wadding alone for a blank in a gun that size is sufficient to kill you...” [Hardastarboard, post 54]
The guy’s name was Jon-Erik Hexum. He mortally wounded himself with a 44 cal blank on the set of the television series Cover Up.
Shaky judgment and poor knowledge of firearms also afflicted Hexum’s female co-star, actress/model Jennifer O’Neill.
Some time after Hexum’s demise, she shot herself in the abdomen with a small-caliber handgun, in her Westchester NY home. Didn’t know it was loaded, or some similar lame excuse. She recovered after treatment.
The incident caused a minor stir at the time as the gun was not registered with authorities: a requirement under New York State law since 1911. She was not prosecuted.
Can’t recall now if anti-gun activists made anything of it, but gun-rights organizations did point out that her self-wounding occurred just after New York officials cracked down on handguns found in possession of otherwise law-abiding citizens but lacking “proper” registration: too many perps getting shot in the act or frightened off.
A blank cartridge doesn’t need even so much as a wad to do lethal harm: the lacquered card which seals many blanks for military small arms is typically shattered and burned to ash before it reaches the muzzle. But the hot gases that do emerge are still deadly.
The energy contained in the powder of a blank is just as potent as that in the powder of any live round; at close range, the hot gases from a blank are moving just as quickly as any bullet, so the shockwave they create will shatter bone and eat into flesh just as violently.
The bullet of a live round is simply the means of conveying the kinetic energy generated by the burning powder to a distant target. It’s more dense than air and solid, so it loses velocity at a lower rate.
Similar thing happened to Terry Kath of the band Chicago in the late 1970’s.