So I've been farming off a few sky rats around my place with my Nitro piston Gamo CFX .22 lately to keep them from crapping all over my stuff and i made a mistake that scared the crap out of me.
I calmly cocked the rifle, loaded the pellet, closed the rotary breech and took aim on the thing. Waited for the right moment and squeezed the trigger, only to get the biggest fright of my life! At first, I thought the rifle deiseled on me, it let out that much of a crack- like a .22lr. but i didn't get the usual smoky smell i did when i first got it (before i cleaned it all out) and it was louder!
I pulled down the cocking arm a bit to release the breech, rolled it open and there was the darn pellet! WTF???
As it turns out, the pellet somehow fell back out of the barrel without me noticing but stayed in the groove of the breech so when i fired, it was a complete dry fire! Ouch!
I have not tried firing it again yet but hopefully no damage and a valuable lesson learnt.