Not to worry, there were no injuries, just a flash/bang in the wrong place, and a bit of powder-singed skin, when my Glock 35 misbehaved during a match last night.

What happened was that on the sixth or seventh shot at a series of targets, the handgun fired partly out of battery. (That means that its slide/barrel were not fully locked up when the firing pin hit the casing/primer.) As the brass shell casing was not encased in the steel chamber, the internal pressure relieved itself partly by blowing a hole in the side of the casing, blowing the entire magazine down and out of the gun, and making a pretty flash/bang just above my hand. Of course we stopped shooting right away and looked for damaged something or someone but found nothing, except this shell casing:

We opened up the pistol; it looked fine. The gun was later fired again, and appeared to work fine.

Those present at the match offered different opinions what might have caused the malfunction. Old caked-on dirt, preventing the retraction of the firing pin after the previous shot? Case failure due to “glock bulge”? I’m glad it was not a full Glock kB!. I can only control some of that, so I’m off to clean the guns for the first time in four years.