Accidents

This morning I heard a little blurb on the radio about a former baseball player who may loose a finger after he nearly shot it off when cleaning his gun. These stories come up from time to time: Someone put a bullet though a wall or the floor while cleaning a gun. But what I found most appalling was the way the news story made it sound like an accident. Apparently, guns can just go off! Without someone having loaded ammunition, disengaging a safety, and pulling the trigger. I never knew this could happen.

Oh wait, it can't! Just don't just go off. This was not an accident. These situations are negligence; plain and simple. An accident indicates that there is little to no fault of the person involved. Not true. Here are the series of events that had to take place for a negligent discharge (as it's called by the firearms community).
1. The gun must have had ammunition loaded into the chamber. You should not be doing this unless: a: you are in a suitable area for shooting a gun and are planning to shoot; or b: you are utilizing the weapon for a self defense purpose. Regardless of which was the case here, it was not an accidental loading.
2. The safety must be disengaged. I'll give a little leeway here since handguns have many different types of safeties or even no safety at all.
3. The trigger must have been pulled. This is the most heinous violation of the rules of firearm safety. Forgetting it was loaded, he probably needed to fall the hammer and most people just dry fire the weapon to do that. Unless you are actively engaging in dry fire drills, it's best practice to lower a hammer softly as one more layer of caution.

I won't unleash the well deserved tirade about how he should have cleared the weapon the moment he picked it up. Another best practice when receiving any firearm. Your life could be at risk if you or someone else has forgotten a round in the chamber.

The point is simply that this was not an accident. No question in my mind. And he was very lucky; as I believe his fiance was also with him. People have been shot and killed in that very same situation. I shudder to think of the guilt that would come from harming someone unintentionally like that. In addition to the likely criminal charges you would face.

The media should start to portray firearm negligence as just that. We don't say that the drunk driver accidentally ran into a telephone pole. "Accident" doesn't relieve responsibility when something happens because someone was taking risks.