How can ammunition types get mixed up? Poor training and carelessness are the immediate causes.

It is not uncommon in serious training to conduct a blank fire rehearsal of a section or platoon assault before doing it with real ammunition. Thus troops may be in possession of two types of ammunition at some time during the exercise.

However, all blank is supposed to be withdrawn before the live fire phase. Sometimes a dopey digger will “forget” to remove the blank adapter. How this can happen is beyond me as they are painted “signal red” and look funny on the end of the barrel. Machine guns have special blank-firing barrels with muzzle restrictor nuts instead of flash hiders on them, so they are also a bit obvious.

The rules controlling ammunition issue and withdrawal are very straightforward to the point of obsessiveness.

Blank and ball have very different recoil and muzzle blast characteristics as well.

What has me perplexed in this French case is the sheer quantity of ball rounds fired without the firer noticing the destruction / loss of the BFA and the greatly increased muzzle blast. Poor situational awareness is putting it mildly.

Tragic for the victims.

Assuming the kickee was the shooter, it might not mean anything other than he didn’t notice people getting hurt – a common cause of shooting accidents is not to notice what is happening behind the target – but it would certainly indicate that the injuries were perceivable by someone paying attention.

I suspect this guy is going to be in pretty serious merde. Having the live ammo is probably a pretty serious breach of protocol and procedures to start with, let alone then not noticing it when he loaded his weapon is another level of negligence. As for hitting 19 people from a 30 round magazine… if eveyrone was crowded together then firing a full magazine in a burst might still hit that many people. But to get through a full mag without noticing people were being shot seems remerkable.