A worse mistake would be to imagine that risk can ever be managed to zero by just setting a bunch of rules. To err is human - mistakes hapepn, most of the time, we get away with it. Sometimes mistake and bad luck intersect and a bad thing happens.
Pool, I’m sorry you got hurt. I’m glad that you are OK (it could have been much worse).
You sound like me. For years I prided myself on not driving stupid. Never had a crash. Then last year I drove stupid and crashed my car, badly. By dint of the most ridiculous luck, I crawled out of the wreckage without a scratch. Thankfully I was driving alone, as anyone sitting in my passenger seat would have been killed. Apart from totaling my car, the damage was entirely mental: I felt awful for a week, including a total sobbing meltdown several days later that compelled me to take the afternoon off from work. And I continued to feel really bad for a few weeks longer.
Your poor judgment got you hurt worse than mine did, but (I hope) not irreparably so. It’s a bit of good luck that you didn’t hit your femoral artery, and also that nobody else got hurt. The Asoh defense is painful, but it’s the right approach; you will get over it sooner, and it will make you a more careful firearm user in the future.
And yes, adrenalin can make you do stupid things in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Driving yourself to the hospital wasn’t the smartest thing, but there wasn’t anyone else there to intercede and make a more level-headed decision. Immediately after my crash, I quickly climbed out of my car without looking around to see whether I was in the driving lanes, or whether anyone else might be about to hit me - and I also didn’t bother to turn the ignition off. Individuals who have just been directly through a major trauma (that would be you and me) have about a gallon of adrenalin streaming through their body, and should be granted a bit of slack if they make less-than-brilliant tactical decisions.
I guess we’re human after all.
I’m glad you’re (relatively) okay, pool!
I’ll share my accidental discharge story here, it it helps you feel better. I was barely into my teens and one afternoon, while my dad was out of town and my mom was at work, I decided to put together all the pieces of my dad’s small-caliber semi-auto pistol.
My dad was careful, he had the ammunition hidden in one place, the magazine in another, and the pistol in yet another, but I had found all three in the course of snooping around the house. I loaded the magazine, put it in the pistol, then pulled it back out a bit and cycled the slide. I thought I had pulled the mag down far enough that it wouldn’t chamber a round, but I didn’t check.
Luckily I wasn’t pointing the weapon at myself when I pulled the trigger, but I did manage to shoot the family television!
I had already passed Hunter’s Safety at that age, so I should have been smarter, but I made a stupid mistake. I’m ironclad when it comes to firearm safety to this day, maybe to the point of paranoia, and this incident is probably part of it.
Incidentally, this is also why all of my firearms are locked in a safe, and all ammunition locked in a completely separate safe. I have kids, and I know how persistent and stupid they can be, because I was just that.
Thanks August West I appreciate that, Just to clear things up I have owned various guns before and I also have kids and always keep them in a safe that is bolted down and hidden away. All the guns I had prior were semi-automatic Glocks with magazines and if cleaning or taking them apart I always pull the slide back multiple times after removing the magazine to make sure no rounds are left in the chamber. This gun however was a revolver and although I’ve used them many times this was the first one I actually owned.
My mistake, and what a stupid, easily avoidable mistake it was, was that I dumped all the bullets out of the cylinder but apparently one remained in one of the chambers and I took it for granted that they were all now out of the gun without taking 2 seconds to both count the bullets in my hand, visually inspect the cylinder to make sure all chambers were empty, and not pointing the gun away from myself when pulling the trigger. Easily avoidable and I will never forget to do those things again, I’m slowly beginning to feel better and I will use this as a lesson learned scenario and be far more diligent in the future about safety when dealing with any guns I own.
Congrats on not being Deadpool!
#1 - Every gun is always loaded, even if you just emptied it yourself.
#2 - Always point a gun downrange.
Enjoy,
Steven
Glad you are OK. I’ve been a gun enthusiast most of my life as are many of my friends. I have seen at least three accidental discharges by others and three by me. Two (when I was young) involved air guns, no injuries, one pellet hole in a plaster ceiling. One was a handgun which I thankfully was intentionally pointing in a safe direction but did not intend to fire at that moment. It was an unfamiliar gun with a lighter than expected trigger pull. The bullet went into the brush, out in the woods and well away from my shooting companions. I was stupid to have my finger on the trigger. Lesson well learned.
You cannot overdo gun safety. You cannot be complacent.
One of the ADs I witnessed by someone else (from my post above) was the exact same scenario. That person did exactly what you describe and then shot a hole in the floor directly between their own feet. It was a new revolver and one round stuck in the cylinder and came up on the first click.
Update: The doctors refused to remove the bullet from my thigh even though I told them it caused me pain every day. Two years later huge abcess formed right where the bullet was, I went to one ER and they refused to remove the bullet and only offered antibiotics. Another week goes by and I can’t take it anymore it just keeps getting bigger.
I go to a different ER, god bless these doctors actually listened to what I was telling them. They used an Ultrasound and saw that the bullet was inside the abscess and only a centimeter under the skin. As soon as they stuck the syringe in to numb the area pus and blood started pouring out and then they cut out and removed the bullet, packed the wound with gauze, and gave me antibiotics.
I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off me and just felt like posting an update if anyone cared, haha.
So glad things are improving for you.
You ARE planning on keeping the bullet, right? Encase it in Lucite and use it as a paperweight? Do something with it that will prompt others to ask about the story behind it.
Purely out of curiosity, what caliber is the bullet?
Good grief. Why wouldn’t they take it out? Hell, at only a centimetre under the skin I’d have done self-surgery on it. But then I’m rather morbid like that.
How’s the use of your injured hand? I hope it wasn’t your dominant one.
I suspect he was holding the gun and pulling the trigger with the dominant hand.
I got it as:
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Never point a gun at anyone unless you want to kill them
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Guns are always loaded
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Even if you’ve removed all the bullets and done everything else to ensure that the gun is not loaded*, if the gun is pointed at a person** the gun is loaded!
My ex ran with a group of friends who were all gun nuts.
One friend was demonstrating a new gun. He took out the magazine, emptied out all the bullets, put the magazine back in… and shot himself in the stomach.
Fortunately for him, he aimed it sideways, and he had a rather large stomach, so it only went through fat. Ex thought it was a subconscious self-sabotage, because the friend was supposed to show up in court the next day for a lawsuit.
*it’s been many years since I’ve handled a gun, because that was my ex’s thing and I never had any desire to deal with guns otherwise. So pardon if I’ve got the terminology wrong
**or for that matter, a pet or any other living thing that might be killed by your carelessness
Wow, it seems crazy to me that they didn’t remove the bullet two years ago as part of the initial treatment of your wounds. Best of luck on the recovery.
Glad to hear the injury is finally resolving. Ugh.
I am not a safety engineer, but I work at a government safety board. One of the board’s major points of emphasis is that “engineered controls” (things like locks, physical barriers, and mechanical methods of preventing actuation) are much superior to "administrative controls (things like signs, warning labels, and training).
Typo intentional? It’s priceless if not. 
I hope you’ve let the kids out occasionally in the years since this was posted.
Kudos on the pun!
Another rule: Even blanks can kill a person
The injured hand works pretty well now, that knuckle seems to have sort of a permanent bone spur or something on it now where it looks larger than the others but I can do push ups and still play my bass fine, which is honestly one of the things I worried about the most as it’s my favorite hobby.
That finger feels a little weird and doesn’t have quite the range of motion it originally did, I can’t bend it all the way inward towards my palm unless it is in unison with the other fingers.
Nope. For many, if not most locations, far more damage can be done by removing bullets from the body (unless they’re in a critical area) than by just leaving them there.
And going fishing for foreign bodies (like bullets) that are ‘just under the skin’ has led many doctors astray, rooting around endlessly in bloody tissue, even with the use of ultrasound and fluoroscopy. Though the presence of an abscess does make it easier to find.
I’ve removed more than a few bullets from my current patient clientele, years, and even decades after the shooting. But generally only after they’ve migrated very VERY close to the surface.
I assume your bullet was saved by the hospital as evidence. That’s SOP.
Yes they kept the bullet, not that I wanted it, that thing was cursed I tell you! Why do you think it took two years for this abcess to occur? Even before that I had pain like stabbing every day and the area seemed permanently bruised.
My only guess was maybe because the bullet was a hollow point with jagged edges that made it difficult to just be held in place without causing irritation and the large thigh muscle, walking and running daily for two years must have slowly but surely pushed it to the surface.