The newsreader said “he was hit in the back several times.”
Sounds exceedingly unlikely. First, he’d have to have an AK with a full automatic mode, which means he’s either one of the relatively limited legal owners of such weapons, or he’s a grandpa with an illegal AK for hunting (and the presence of actual illegal AKs available is exaggerated). Then, he would have to be walking around with the selector on the full auto setting. Then the accidentally snagged weapon would’ve had to have snagged in such a way that the recoil of the weapon did not throw off the second round so that multiple rounds hit.
The odds of those things being true are very unlikely. CNN is most likely wrong or lying.
Hi, I’m back. Evil Captor is wrong. I’m not trying to defend anything that happened, nor am I trying to derail the thread into a gun debate.
Let me tell you something - the thread was derailed from the minute it was posted, because of that stupid term “gun fetishist.”
I called the OP on his bullshit and so far as I can see, he has not come back to this thread to apologize like a gentleman for his use of the loaded and utterly inappropriate phrase.
That’s all.
Who on earth ever acts like a gentleman in the Pit?
OK, well, this was a drive-by pitting, and “gun fetishist” is a retarded phrase and is loaded with negative connotations and I think the OP is a fool. Nobody who was not anti-gun would use such a term. He also said he “has guns in the house” and that he “has been shooting.” Maybe I’m totally off base here but I think if you own a gun, you should practice at a range regularly to keep your skills up, but that’s off topic.
I say sir, perhaps you’d care for a cognac before we continue with this discussion in the study?
I do believe I shall take you up on that offer, old chap. I have an excellent batch of H. Uppmans in, if you’d care for one. Young Bertie fetches them for me - Father’s Day, and all that rot.
Now, do be careful with those pistols, won’t you?
Smashing. 
Oh, and yes by all means, allow me to retire them to their rightful place in the game room and then let’s proceed.
Carrying a loaded, chambered AK through brush with the safety off while following another person doesn’t fit that description?
Not if you go back and read my explanation of why, it doesn’t.
Causal chain just isn’t there.
Why on earth isn’t walking along in a forest with your safety off, no clearly established fields of fire, an unprotected trigger guard, and a round chambered considered hardness of heart? (Thanks for the legal term.) You’ve clearly made the decision that the trisk of killing a human being is worth the extra chance at game. Why is the guy who wanted to drive fast clearly a felon and the guy who wanted to shoot quickly clearly not?
Sailboat
Because those are OMISSIONS< not affirmative acts.
Don’t tell anybody you learned it from me until you get the hang of it. 
No, actually, you haven’t. A negligent omission is worlds different from an affirmative act.
Because the two acts are different. Driving fast is a blameworthy act. Shooting quickly is not. Dead pedestrians are a foreseeable consequence of driving fast. Dead grandsons are not a foreseeable consequence of forgetting to put the safety on in a hunting environment.
I’m not saying you have to like it. Maybe no amount of logic will convince you. But that IS the way it is, and I for one (and I share this view with the vast majority of people) think that it’s valid.
OK, I re-read it. Here’s your words:
“[A]ffirmatively doing something that you are substantially certain poses a danger to the lives of others”
Are you suggesting gramps did not understand the dangers associated with guns?
There is just as much chain in one as there is in the other. I think you are hung up on the legal definitions. I know it’s not prosecutable due to current laws, I’m arguing that it should be.
Horse crap.
You’re then one recycling “retarded” and “stupid”. I have a relative with Down’ syndrome and I don’t like your puerile attempts to get a rise out of me.
You said
Yeah, if you got your education from Penthouse Letters, that’s what it means. A fetish also means a talisman believed to have magical power, and is used in some cases to describe an object someone feels stronger or safer when possessing. That’s an absolute spot-on description of some gun-toting folks I’ve met, by their own words too.
Remember how well all those guns protected that Reagan fellow from that Hinckley fellow? To some extent, the idea that guns provide defense is magical thinking. Offense, sure. Retribution, sure. The ability to intervene from the position of bystander, perhaps. Deterrence…well, that’s ceratinly debatable. But once a bad guy has his gun on you, thinking you can get your gun, concealed or holstered, into play is foolish, unless you’re Wyatt Fucking Earp.
I’ve known people who get their gunm and stand in the hallway listening to neighbors argue. I knew a guy who sat in his car with his gun in his lap listening to a police scanner…when I asked him why, he said he figured that if a cop got shot he might be able to get to the perp and “they’d let me shoot a cop killer.” He didn’t particularly like cops, but he was excited about the chance to kill someone legally. I’ve known someone who wasm shooting a rifle at treetops in a populated area but claimed to be a “safe user.” I worked with a woman whose husband threw hs loaded gun onto his truck seat and it went off, gut-shooting him.
Perahps I was going out on a limb using the term gun fetishist about this particular grandpa, but there clearly do exist people who dream about guns and get a sense of power from them and use them inappropriately, and “fetishist” sin’t a wrong term to apply to them. And I’ll speculate that they’re involved in at least their fair share of gun accidents. So if it helps you sleep, keep in mind I pitted them in the generic sense and ping me for my lumping Grandpa in with them based onlyn on circumstantial evidence (i.e., no sensible gun owner would have done what he did). But don’t feed me some line of crap about how there’s no such thing.
Nah, I’ve been calling them fighter pilots. But I do complain to my wife about fast car movies like The Fast and the Furious making reckless driving sexy, and I’ve advocated that executives who authorize automobile commercials that sell “fast driving” to teenagers should be sentenced to accompany paramedics scraping up highway accidents. So I probably will say “car fetishist” from now on.
Sailboat
Dead SOMEONES are very much so a foreseeable consequence of failing to put the safety on. I foresee it. You can too. That’s why a safety was designed.
Are you arguing that cars ALWAYS hit a human every time the accelerator is depressed? Because I’m not arguing that guns ALWAYS kille someone every time you violate a whole bunch of commonsense safety rules. So we’re talking weighed probabilities here? Are you arguing that there’s some invisible line of percentage chance, and that “pedestrians wandering in front of my car” is on one side of that line and “gun snagging on a tree while I’m walking around pointing it at people” is safely on the other side of that line? Can you define that line a little better?
Nah. Maybe legal scholarship says otherwise…it’s possible that bad predcedent and inane argument make it into the legal system. But Gramps didn’t forget to have his safety on…everyone knows that. He* took his safety off* because he wanted to shoot quickly. If I step on the accelerator because I want to drive quickly, I’m taking a risk with the lives of bystanders…but so is shooting reflexively, let alone walking around with the safety off pointing the gun at people. The two things may not be exactly parallel…but…uh…hell, they sure look exactly parallel.
Sailboat
Alright, well, if you’re opposed to people who have some unnatural and unsafe obsession with guns and who have accidents with them, and you want to pit those people, you could have done that without bringing up the article you linked to.
There’s no evidence that the grandpa or grandson were “gun fetishists” but you say:
I object to this over the top, dramatic language. How do you know they were “worshiping” the “golden gun?” How were they any different from any other grandfather and grandson who were out hunting? You bet I’m gonna call you on it if you use cheap emotional language like this. In this day and age when the anti-gun movement has swayed thousands with similar cheap, emotional tactics that play on deception and weasel words instead of facts, and hijacks every gun accident into a reason for tighter gun control, I’ll be damned if I sit by when yet another person goes over the top with emotionally charged language in what should be a reasonable discussion.
I like the cut of your jibberish!
Seriuously, I’ve grown weary here on the SDMB of fighting the same battle, with the same tired, hackneyed rhetoric. Keep up the good fight. Folks like you and Airman Doors (you really oughta see about getting your screen name updated, dude; if you’re still an Airman then I’m the very model of a modern Major General) give me strength.
Well, I appreciate the compliment. People say I’m paranoid but I truly do believe that Obama is going to be our next president for better or worse, and that we will see tighter gun restrictions because of this. The last time we had a Democrat in office, we saw fanatical and illogical “gun control” laws, and there’s no reason to think it won’t happen again. I do think that Obama both knows nothing about guns whatsoever, and despises them. Why else would he have sought to ban all handguns and all semi-automatics? I think that even if he doesn’t do it right away, a few years into his term when (hopefully) the Iraq war and the oil prices are less of a problem, he’ll do it then. Some group of politicians and lobbyists will hand him some anti-gun bills and he’ll sign them so fast, he’ll go through a case of pens.
As gun owners it is our duty to stand up for our second amendment rights at this crucial point in time - not obnoxiously, but logically, reasonably and in an intellectual way. For too long, gun owners have been stigmatized as fools and whackos. It’s our calling, as articulate and respectable people, to be ambassadors for this cause, and to do our best to counter any ill-informed arguments that undermine it.
So, what exactly are these “Canadian attitudes” that you find idiotic? Or was that just a “no, YOU’RE a doody-head” type response?
What? It only counts if you kill someone? WTF? And my Canadian attitude is idiotic?
My point is, in 2005 every 34 MINUTES someone in the USA was accidentally injured with a firearm. This didn’t not include BB and pellet guns. You can say it’s a big country, lots of people blah blah blah… but you guys have some serious unsafe gun owners.