Danger!

[4onaside]

Last night my wife told me about someone here in Jackson with whom we had a casual acquaintance blowing off his thumb last week with a Muzzleloader. As I thought it odd that this person was hunting on the Cumberland plateau, due to the distance from our area, the incident having already been reported on Tndeer, I went back and determined that it was not the same incident. So that's at least two people in Tennessee with the same injury this past week. If you think about it, just the nature of a MZ makes it inherently more dangerous than a conventional rifle, by at least some part of your body having to be in the general path of a bullet in loading, each and every time. Ideally it is never primed at that stage, but these two incidents prove that is not always the case. Take extra precautions to make sure that your's is not.

 

[vonb]

To add to this, it's never a good idea to put your hand over the top of your ramrod should there be some burning embers left (from previous shot(s)) in the barrel during loading. A friend of mine used to compete with a muzzleloader and said he'd seen a couple with ramrods go through the shooter's hand.