Pinfire (an early method of making self-contained cartridges) was horribly likely to fire outside the gun. Rimfire is safer, and centrefire safer still, but it can still happen. A friend of mine once dropped a shotshell on a broken stone path, a corner of stone hit the primer and it fired. Being unconfined, it wasn't dangerous; the hull split, and the shot cup barely broke the crimp. It was, however, quite a shock, and he was a LOT more careful with his shells afterwards!
The basic answer is "possible but unlikely". I've heard that spitzer bullets and tubular magazines are a Bad Combination, as recoil can cause the nose of one round to set off the primer of the next, resulting in a chain reaction in the magazine, but I've never seen evidence of it happening (not that I'd want to put spitzers into a tube mag, just in case!) but in general, it's unlikely something small and pointy enough is going to hit the primer hard enough to get things going. |
