User blog comment:773066/What happens to Altairs Armor./@comment-1461869-20100728152127/@comment-71.76.181.41-20110924130952

@anon (this is Uly, by the way, just can't log in right now b/c of weirdness with Chrome) I am a career historian. That statistic is not pulled out of my ass, as you claim. Two of my great-great-great-grandfathers were wounded by their own guns blowing up in their faces. The average muzzle-loading musket, Civil War era, was really quite poorly made, and powder burns and the like were extremely common. In the 14th NC Regiment, Company G, of 104 men in the company, fully 84 were KWC. Three were killed by their own muskets exploding from having too much powder compressed into too small an area, and sixteen - more than 10% of the company - were moderately or seriously wounded by similar accidents. Thirty died from infection or disease, most of those pneumonia or diarrhea, and the remainder were mundane war casualties. There were only seven captured.

Likewise, Civil War weapons were muskets, rather than rifles. In case you don't know the difference, muskets are smooth-bore and fire a spherical lead ball whereas rifles have this invention called 'rifling' that lets them fire their semiconical projectiles much, much more accurately. An average Civil War musket would be lucky to hit a target the size of a large window, let alone someone's chest or head, at the distances normally experienced during battles.

No, I am not a dipshit. Kindly use that thing called the 'Internet' to do something called 'research' before calling me out on anything.