Defective Ordnance?

I understand this was an example of defective ordnance.

Possibly, but that does not appear to be an actual mortar tube and one certainly does not hold the tube while dropping the rounds in.
We had a program in Vietnam to booby-trap captured ammo named Eldest Son or Italian Green. Thousands of captured 7.62 and 12.7mm rounds had their powder removed and replaced with C4. 81mm mortar rounds had their fuses replaced with ones that would trigger at launch. One or two of the adulterated rounds were returned to their original crates and the crates returned to the NVA/VC cache. I pesonally never thought much of the idea. We were giving the enemy thousands of good rounds with one that MIGHT kill/injure one enemy.
It's been reported recently that the Syrian state military has launched a similar operation its long-running civil war against various rebel groups. According to the New York Times, pro-Assad forces have been secretly passing booby-trapped rounds to enemy fighters via illegal arms bazaars across the region. There are also reports that the U.S. military has been booby trapping insurgent bullets in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

I think that would kill him no matter if it was done it by the manual or not.
Using his hand instead of a elevating bipod, and looks like not much of a base plate too, normal practice for unconventional forces wanting to travel light.
When you're dealing with mass produced munitions, probably not stored under the best of conditions for decades maybe, shit happens.

Or maybe like Mike suggest a booby trapped fuse. Made so it would explode on setback instead of impact.

mikewint said:

We had a program in Vietnam to booby-trap captured ammo named Eldest Son or Italian Green. Thousands of captured 7.62 and 12.7mm rounds had their powder removed and replaced with C4. 81mm mortar rounds had their fuses replaced with ones that would trigger at launch. One or two of the adulterated rounds were returned to their original crates and the crates returned to the NVA/VC cache. I pesonally never thought much of the idea. We were giving the enemy thousands of good rounds with one that MIGHT kill/injure one enemy.

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I'd figure the only way that would work would be to make an estimate of how many they'd fire testing the gun out before they went into combat. Say the fire one or two rounds, then use the rest. The problem is if they used a whole clip or two for testing, which clip are they going to use?

Zipper730 said:

fire testing the gun out before they went into combat.

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Don't recall ever "test-firing" my rifle. Now when the "new" AR-15s arrived we "played" with them quite a bit AND were warned NOT to clean them. The armorers took a few apart with the factory rep but there were no manuals at the time nor cleaning kits.
No one abused their rifle, it was your life line. They were carefully cleaned, oiled, inspected every opportunity.
The idea was to adulterate maybe 1 out of a 1000 or more rounds. So you could do a lot of test firing and get no where. The idea was to make Charlie distrust the ammo and by extension the Chinese/Russians who supplied it. The exploding bullets would blow the entire AK bolt backwards severely injuring or killing the shooter.
As I posted earlier, it still gave Charlie 999 good bullets to shoot at me plus we were lugging cases of ammo through the jungle both ways