eli5: How does a gun backfire? isn’t there any mechanism in place to prevent it from happening?
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Firearms are designed to operate with a certain amount of pressure. It’s that pressure that operates the “automatic” parts and it’s what the load-bearing parts of the firearm have to contain. They’re also designed so that the firing mechanism will only work when everything is closed up (“in battery”) so all the pressure goes where it’s supposed to.
If the pressure is too low, the action will not fully cycle and you might get a failure to eject the spent case or failure to feed the next one. In those cases, the gun cannot go back into battery until the jam is cleared.
If the firearm is suddenly subjected to pressures far above what it’s expecting (like firing a cartridge that’s hotter than you expected), then [this](https://youtu.be/1449kJKxlMQ) happens.
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