Holy cow Paul. Brutal story. I know about the one eye thing. It's not fun.
As for Bruce's story, I certainly have noticed the cheapening of shotgun ammo over the years. The bases are of thinner, and cheaper metal, the rims out of round(AA's especially) and the primers are thinner and easier to cave in during setting with one of the old hand tools. For some you just can't use those as you'll cave in every primer, especially if you're using older stout based paper shells. I sure never had that issue when I was using gradpa's old hand kit on vintage ribbed green Remington paper hulls in the early 60's. So, I have no trouble seeing a modern primer getting severely pierced and degassing out the back. I've had a lot of mildly pierced primers, generally on hammer guns that are set to activate the stout old primers. New primers just don't require that much of a whack to set them off so the hammer guns pierce them. I'm sure it's the same with older hammerless guns. They're designed for the stout older primers. There had to be some design criteria for how hard the hammers struck; surely they didn't just make up a stout spring, install it and dry fire it once and say, "that sounds good enough". They would have engineered and experimented until they got what worked properly.
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