If that is the only one today, it is a good day.
It’s bad enough that they violated all four laws of safe gun handling, but they seriously thought it was “hilarious”?
I had a negligent discharge once with an “empty” gun. Of course, the muzzle was pointed downrange in a safe direction, but it scared the hell out of me that I dropped the hammer on an “empty” chamber and it responded by going, “Bang!” I have never trusted anyone’s opinion, including my own, on the state of the gun since that incident. If a gun is in battery, it is loaded, regardless that I’ve just chamber-checked it two seconds ago or what the chamber loaded indicator says. I don’t even like to see a weapon in battery out of a holster in the presence of other people; there is just too much opportunity for one small mistake to do serious, life-altering damage.
I don’t know about “gun nuts who claim to be safety-conscious do not really take it all that seriously,” but I’ve met or seen several law enforcement personnel who were unnervingly cavalier about handling their service sidearm. Since many police officers (as well as the public at large) gets the majority of their knowledge about firearms and gun handling from movies and television I suppose the result shouldn’t be surprising.
Well, there’s the daily does of hyperbole for you. School and public mass shootings are tragic, but they’re actually pretty rare and represent only a fraction of a percentage of total violent crime.
Stranger
I wasn’t there, but my sister reports laughter as the story was told by Dad to his many gun buddies, who were staying in the same hotel. (They had all traveled to a match together.) Now, my Dad is an asshole of the highest order. I have always hoped that the other guys’ laughter was of the nervous variety, but with some of those guys, I’m not sure.
Sorry to hijack this thread with commentary about my father and his buddies.
There was a fellow in my judo class in El Cerrito who had six sizable bullet wounds in his chest. I didn’t ask about them. To answer your other question, he’s Hispanic.
One childhood friend, shot and killed over drugs (He was dealing.)
One high school friend who shot himself in the leg practicing his quick-draw with a loaded 9mm.
I’ve been shot at several times, but so far have managed to remain lead-free.
White, middle-class.
My brother-in-law was murdered this past April. Multiple gunshot wounds.
I’m white suburban female.
A guy in my Scout troop when I was 14. He was 16, White, Male.
He and his 2 best buddies were screwing around with a .45 when one of them aimed the gun at him and fired; killing him instantly.
Completely screwed the 2 buddies for the rest of their lives. Last I saw, both were in & out of mental homes, rehab, homeless, and jobless.
The other person it screwed was the Paramedic that responded to the call. He knew all of us kids; he was one of our Scout leaders.
He handled the call, and quit working the next day. Said he could do the Paramedic job as long as he never knew any of his patients. The moment he knew one of his patients, he couldn’t function anymore.
The one who came out the best was the kid who was killed.
Eli
Yes. Some friends of mine were on the last leg of some laddish European holiday that included mountain climbing, skiing and the like - they’d finished all the mountain stuff and drove down to the south of France to camp for a while before returning home. Late in the evening, they drove into what appeared to be a camp site, but was in fact - unknown to them - a gypsy camp - they stopped the car and got out and a guy with a shotgun started firing buckshot at them - they bundled back into the car and drove off, but a shot came through the back window and a couple of the balls hit one guy in the back - one went (IIRC) through his cheek and the other went in through the back of his neck and ended up lodged in the root of his tongue.
They drove him straight to hospital and he made a good recovery (they couldn’t safely remove the shot from his tongue though) - I saw photographs of the car - it looked like a colander. The police went looking for the gypsies, but they were gone. It could very easily have just turned into a multiple murder - there was little doubt that the guy was shooting to kill.
I was accidentally shot in the arse when I was around 13 or 14 by my brother. It was with a .22 and it was from very, very far away so it was actually not as bad as when I was shot in the arm by a pellet rifle by another of my brothers, also on accident.
All of us white males.
A guy who was dating a co-worker of mine a long time ago was lit up 6 or 7 times with a 9mm while standing in a driveway in a town near where I grew up. It was supposedly a case of mistaken identity, and three years later he was still in and out of the hospital on a regular basis due to the wounds he recieved.
One of my closest friends is missing a chunk of flesh about the size of a baseball from his right calf. When he was a kid, he was playing at a friend’s house in the garage. Said friends father, as it turned out, was an ex-cop who was in the habit of keeping loaded hunting rifles out in the open in places he knew children would be playing. One of his rifles got jostled, fell onto the cement floor of the garage, and nearly blew my friend’s leg off.
Luckily for him, the hospital he was taken to was pioneering a new procedure for reattaching tendons, and he was one of the first successful patients for what I understand is now a fairly routine procedure. Despite his leg looking like the aforementioned “broomstick wrapped in bacon,” he hasn’t got so much as a limp. If he’s wearing long pants, you’d never know there was something wrong with his leg.
Oh, and the dad who was so cavalier about gun storage? He abandoned his wife and child and fled the country, rather than be on the hook for my friend’s medical bills.
This happened in Los Angeles. All parties involved were white, suburban, and poor.
There was an unbelievable interview snippet of a student in the Cleveland school who had seen the shooter loading up his guns in the restroom and just went back to class and “forgot about it 'cause we were joking around and stuff.” WTF???
White urban/suburban female. We heard gunshots a few times when we lived in Oakland and I’ve know a few friend or relative of a friend suicides. No one I know directly has been shot, as far as I am aware. My dad has been a police chaplain for many years and may have been drawn on or shot at a couple of times, but they missed. (These were invariably domestic violence situations.)
I know several people who have been shot, and several people who have shot someone.
When I was 15, my best friend murdered a man outside of a nightclub. He was just released from jail 1 year ago.
I’d be really interested to hear the real stories behind a lot of these “i dropped the gun and it went off” anecdotes. Anyone who’s dealt with guns knows that guns don’t just “go off” when dropped - you could take just about any gun and drop it perfectly onto the ground and it’s not going to go off.
Not trying to throw out the apple of discord, but I bet there’s a lot more to some of these stories.
Never? Never ever??
Qadgop doesn’t play around when it comes to collecting co-payments and bill balances.
I was almost shot. Back in October of 2005, I was a passenger in a car with one of these guys who swears that “I’m supposed to wear glasses, but I don’t really need them”. Of course, he didn’t tell me this until after I started having to read the signs to him. At that point, my friend and I were already in his car, we were high, and we needed to get to In-N-Out, because, well, you know. On the way, he apparently cut some trucker off. After a while, he realized that the trucker was following him; he tried to lose him, but the guy was determined, so he pulled off to the curb on a side street.
Trucker came to a screeching halt right next to us, and he and the driver of the car I was in exchanged some choice words. The trucker stepped out of the car and drew his gun. Thankfully, our driver sped off before he got a chance to fire at us.
In a surreal twist, almost exactly one year later, the other passenger and I came very close to rooming with the trucker who tried to kill us. But that’s a story for another thread.
I’ve done enough fooling around with other men’s girlfriends/wives that I’m kind of surprised I haven’t been shot at more than that, though. I sold weed for a short period of time, too, but my customers were all pretty relaxed people who only got more relaxed once they started smoking, and my suppliers were the same way.
The other passenger has never been shot at AFAIK, although having guns pointed at him by cops was a pretty normal occurrence in his childhood. His dad was a fugitive, and didn’t have custody but kidnapped him fairly often. Needless to say, he’s no big fan of guns, cops or fugitives these days.
The two other people I know who have had a gun drawn on them (as far as I can recall) were both drug dealers at the time. One was actually shot at, but apparently he booked it once he saw the guns come out, and he safely made his escape before they could get a lock on him.
No, actually, now I remember another guy I was in boot camp with. Big muscle-bound dude. I called him “Tiny”; I can’t remember his real name. Anyway, apparently he got in an argument in his native Detroit and ended up with a bullet in his back, and if they (ie, surgeons in general) ever took the bullet out he would be paralyzed and/or die. He never went into much detail about the shooting, except to say it was over “an argument”. He gave the impression, though, that he hadn’t really done anything that would cause the average person to try to kill him. Who’s to say, really? It was Detroit.
Another guy I was in boot camp with, well…the last time I talked to him on the phone he said that he was going to jail “soon”, because he did something “really bad”. No further details were given, but I can’t get in touch with him. Knowing him as well as I do, it was probably a crime of passion and he was probably easy to convict, though I can’t speculate as to whether he used a gun. It was in either Iowa or Texas, though, so it would’ve been pretty easy for him to get one if he wanted one.
I won’t answer your race question, although I hope you’ve seen that the answer to your question is a little different than you might have expected.
tomatoes?
QtM works at a correctional facility.
This was in the Bay Area, you say?
About two years ago here in San Diego, a couple of tourists got in an argument at the Pacific Beach Hotel. One of them pulled out his nine, fired at his debate partner, missed, and the bullet went through the wall and straight into another tourist in the adjacent room. IIRC, Tourist #3 shuffled off this mortal coil later that night.
Just to be clear: do you mean “don’t fiddle around with your gun”, “never assume it’s unloaded”, “don’t point it at people” and “don’t pull the trigger unless you want to kill what you’re pointing at”?
Homebrew competitions? Debate team rivalries gone wrong? Curious Dopers want to know!
Well, that wasn’t my dad. The bullet in my dad’s case did go through the wall to the next room. Mom insisted he go find out if anyone was injured. Dad didn’t want to, but finally, he did. Turned out that it was another shooter in the room next door. He was one of the ones who thought the incident was hilarious.
Obviously, he probably wouldn’t have felt that way if he’d been shot.
My dad has a shooting buddy who carries his gun into the shower with him, in a plastic bag. I fully expect this guy to be on the 6 o’clock news someday.
A cousin of mine was shot twice while in Vietnam, the first time in the cheek (bullet passed through outside of cheek and went out his open mouth). The second time a year later was in the leg. A co-worker of mine was hit in the left testicle while climbing aboard a helicopter.
The worst result I ever saw from being shot was the druggie brother of a former business partner. He broke into the house of an elderly couple looking for prescription drugs when the old man pointed a shot gun at him. He was trying to back away when the old guy pulled the trigger from about 5 feet away. The blast hit him in the right arm just above the elbow, it took most of the flesh and muscle, leave just the bone. He spent 6 weeks in the hospital, 7 months in jail then sued the old guy for using excessive force and won. Last I heard of this guy was about 10 years ago, he is in a state mental hospital, he literally fried his brain from all the drugs he used.
Maybe I was ambiguous, but I didn’t mean to imply that it was. I was just telling a story that your story reminded me of.
I should have used a stupid smiley there. I was being droll.