I wanted to practice lowering the hammer on my 9mm. I have a CZ with a decocker. But, I wanted to test manually lowering the hammer. There are mixed opinions on the internet about doing this. So, I wanted to test the thresold of a safe lowering.

I have done this a couple times at the range, no discharges. I was out in the country and thought I would push the threshold. After a couple successful lowerings, I started pulling back on the hammer and it slipped. BANG, and the slide came back and smacked me right on the nail of my thumb. Man that hurt.

Anyone else lower the hammer and have any accidents?

No, but I did have the right barrel of a 12 ga double go off when I released the tang mounted safety. The consequent rearward motion of the barrel release lever split my right thumbnail about halfway up. Bleeding from under a fingernal is no fun.

Ryan

P.S. A younger version of me would have either traded or dumped that shotgun after an event like this. I wound up paying a smith to fix it.

I got my finger stuck in the bolt of a KG-99 a few years back. The way my finger was stuck I couldn't get the leverage to free myself. Boy, that was embarrassing to have to ask the gun dealer for help.

Yes and no. Hunting with a pistol, a couple of years ago, I cocked the hammer when I thought that there was a deer moving through the brush -- the gun, of course, was pointed in a safe direction.

I was, to say the least, a little excited, and went through the whole mantra of "be sure of your target and what is beyond," and all. I'm not shooting at sounds, or at the first thing that happens to crash through the brush, after all, without carefully identifying it as a deer (in this case, that would have been all I needed, as I had a doe or buck tag).

It came closer, and I started to get excited. If you've been there, you know what I mean, and I caught sight of it, just off the trail, but still mostly concealed and at a bad angle, and waited, motionless.

The deer moved away, and when I tried to lower the hammer, my finger slipped, and I had a very unintentional bang. No damage, of course, except to my ego.

Accident? Well, yes and no: I was aware that, adrenaline pumping, I might have trouble lowering the hammer, and took the obvious precaution (the same one I would have taken if the adrenaline wasn't pumping).

I practiced lowering the hammer on my CZ75B to the half-cocked position hundreds of times before I was comfortable lowering it on a loaded chamber when carrying the gun. Make that "proficient" instead of "comfortable." I was never comfortable doing this in my house. This is one of the reasons why I selected a Glock 26 instead of a Rami for a compact carry gun.