Merging into the main safety thread...

Here's an interesting one.

Short version: US cop was going in for an MRI scan, and was carrying his sidearm (he was off-duty at the time). There was a snafu in communication between the MRI tech and the cop and the cop wound up taking the pistol into the MRI chamber (the tech had intended to meet the cop in the MRI waiting room to secure the pistol). The pistol did what metal things are wont to do in MRI chambers, and flew the three feet from the top of the table where the cop had put it down, to the inside of the MRI machine itself (for those who don't know, MRI machines are basically enormous magnets and will happily send very heavy metal objects flying at lethal velocities across rooms - oxygen tanks and the like):



So far, so feck's sakes lad, but here's the interesting bit: the pistol discharged. With the thumb safety on and the hammer still cocked and the grip safety also engaged (and the slide never moved to eject the spent cartridge so the thumb safety was working fine). The magnet actually pulled the firing pin forward inside the pistol with enough force to get past all the internal blocks and set off the primer and fire the round (happily hurting nobody and only damaging the wall behind the MRI machine, though I'm assuming the police officer needed new trousers after watching a machine disarm him, make his gun fly through the air and then firing it despite the safety being on).

Interesting case study with some lessons:
- Listen closely to your MRI tech
- Don't bring loaded cocked-and-locked pistols into MRI rooms!
- Don't trust safety catches (and that's the one that I was thinking might actually have some relevance to us here in this country).