On the morning of Thanksgiving 2023, my wife and I drove a short distance to my hometown where we would spend the day with family. We arrived at my parents' house a few hours early so my dad and I would have a chance to go target shooting. Ever since I bought a handgun a year or two earlier, shooting had become a regular activity for us. It was a shared interest and something we enjoyed doing together. Shortly after arriving at my parents' house, my dad and I left in his car for the local gun club. When we got to the gun club, we were the only ones there. This was common and something I liked about shooting there. The club was in town, but it felt like it was in the country. It was mostly surrounded by woods and located on a road that had very little traffic. On one end, there was an area with steel targets such as hanging circular plates. One of the targets was a dueling tree, a vertical column with circular targets on either side. If you hit one of the circular targets, it would swing around behind the center column and come to rest on the opposite side. A year or two earlier I had bought my first handgun, a Ruger LCP Max. I chose the LCP because it is very small, easy to conceal and convenient to carry. However, since small handguns can be hard to shoot, and since I had not yet learned a key principle that would improve my shooting, I wasn't able to consistently shoot that little gun with the accuracy I wanted. Having watched a lot of good reviews of the Smith and Wesson Shield Plus, I bought one. On this Thanksgiving Day trip to the gun club, my Shield Plus was still new and I hadn't shot it very much. At one point I was taking my turn and I decided to shoot at the dueling tree, the one with the circles that swing from one side to the other. I took a few shots with the Shield Plus and was hitting the targets. The gun felt good in my hands and the more percussive 9mm pop made it fun to shoot. I was really enjoying the Shield Plus, mostly because it was easier to shoot. My dad and I continued to take turns shooting and were having a good time. Eventually, we heard some cars coming. A guy that my dad and I know had brought a bunch of his extended family to the gun club. He came over and said hello then returned to his group. At one point I took another turn shooting at the dueling tree. I was enjoying being able to hit the targets and began trying to move from one circle to the next more quickly. In doing this, my aim crossed the center column several times. As I tried to shoot faster, one of my shots was really bad. I took a shot and the bullet, perhaps just a fragment of the bullet, came back to me. As I remember it, I saw the fragment coming toward me, reflecting the sunlight as it was about ten feet away. I remember hearing it as well. I imagine a flattened or jagged fragment would make a sound if moving quickly enough through the air, but I don't know that I would have actually heard that with my ear protection on. As the fragment reached me, I was still in a shooting stance with both arms extended, aiming the gun at the target. I felt it graze my left forearm. I looked at my arm and went back to the bench where my dad was. It looked like someone had drawn a half-inch straight line with a red pen on my forearm. I told my dad what had happened, and we decided to call it a day. We went back to my parents' house where we would soon have a nice Thanksgiving dinner. The next day I asked my wife to take a picture of me while I stood in a shooting stance as if I were shooting at the target again. The line on my arm was consistent with the path of a bullet or fragment coming from the direction of the target. My dad went back to the gun club that next day and took a careful look at the target. He saw there was a small fresh nick in the horizontal center of the target's center column. The column was a sturdy piece of angle iron with a rounded 90-degree bend. So, the leading edge of the angle iron, the surface of the column closest to the shooter wasn't a sharp 90-degree corner, but a smooth rounded corner. A small point on the center of the column was more similar to a flat surface than a sharp 90-degree bend. My bad shot was perfectly bad in a sense, as it hit the center column right in the middle of its rounded leading edge. While lots of people use steel targets, I decided to no longer use them. This experience has helped me become a better and safer shooter as I am now much more mindful of the situations in which there is potential for ricochet.