Saturday night the on again off again bf calls me. His sons 16 year old half brother (same mother, different father) was shot and and killed. By his best friend. Who is 24. Supposedly brought out the loaded gun to show it to him and accidentally shot him while handing it to him.
I know this shit happens, but it is so gd senseless.
The more I hear/read about it the more I wonder wtf was the kids mother and father?
I could never ask the on again off again these questions.
Who lets their 16 year old hang out with a 24 year old?
Why is the 24 year old bringing out a loaded gun outside and handing it to a 16 year old? In a closely packed trailer park no less.
Did nobody ever look at the kids facebook page where he is talking about dipping the blunt in the lean and screwing girls and passing them onto his friends?
Or maybe I am just too critical, or too over protective?
So now a mother has lost her son and a boy has lost his big brother and it all is just so much bullshit
because stuff like this happens everyday, but it shouldn’t happen at all.
I’m still trying to figure out how guns are “accidentally” fired. The few times I shot a gun I had to pull hard on the trigger - like really exert some effort with my finger - but I’m also a fairly small female, so YMMV. Just in my own (very limited) experience firing weapons (twice at The Gun Store in Vegas and once with my buddy at an indoor shooting range) I can’t imagine handling a gun and having my finger anywhere near the trigger until it was pointed safely at the target and I was ready to fire.
On again/Off again says gun had ‘hair trigger’, I said that is meaningless term, he said I don’t know what I am talking about.
He is grieving so no sense in talking about it.
I may not be the best person to answer, but here I go.
Firing a gun basically involves two events - having a hammer strike the charge that will fire the bullet, and before that, the hammer has to be pulled back, or cocked - basically putting enough potential energy that when released, the hammer has enough force to activate the bullet’s charge.*
Guns have several ways of handling these two events. Those with single-action triggers require manually cocking the hammer before pulling the trigger. In double-action guns, pulling the trigger performs both actions.
Some weapons use the energy released from firing the bullet to cock the gun for the next round.
From my experience, I would guess that you have only fired a double action trigger gun, whose trigger can be very hard to pull, because you’re pulling back the hammer first with the trigger. But that’s where most of the effort goes - releasing the hammer is usually fairly easy. And if they person playing with the gun doesn’t pay attention and violates the first law of handling guns**, it’s fairly easy to kill someone accidentally.
There’s also the step of putting the bullet in place for firing, which is minimal effort.
** The first law of firing guns is that a gun pointing at a person is loaded. I don’t care that you just disassembled the gun and reassembled it, haven’t seen a bullet for days, and are just playing around. If a gun is pointed at a person, it is loaded.
I’ve been around guns for some seventy years, and my Father and my Uncles so drilled it into me that a gun is ALWAYS loaded that even today I would find it totally impossible to point any firearm at anyone - even if I had just looked down the bore and saw daylight. If only everyone could have that indoctrination, we would just about eliminate accidental shootings.
Idea!!! How about teaching gun safety in the schools?
Hunkers down awaiting the fury of the gun haters on this Board.[
I was at a get together recently where a new hand gun was being passed around. Don’t get me wrong it was a nice gun. I would have bet my life it was actually unloaded. And nobody was fondling the trigger either. And it wasn’t exactly being pointed directly at anybody either. But, like the Monty Python joke, it was being pointed in peoples general direction (at fairly close range).
I got aggitated pretty fast. I got pissy and publicly obnoxious very, very shortly after that.
And I am both very pro gun rights but also don’t even own one. Never have.
I know some even remotely stupid gun shit when I see it. You treat a fucking gun like magically at any damn moment, hell for that matter the worst possible moment, a bullet will fly out of it and hit anything remotely in the general direction it is pointed.
I’m a big fan of trailer parks. Growing up in an abusive household we somehow found ourselves visiting in one. (I don’t know why. My mother was a furcoat-wearing Republican. But she was also a bootlegger so that might have been it.) But it was great—lawn chairs outside the doors and people passing by with witty how-you-do’s and I got to play with a chameleon.
I’m so sorry somebody got killed, sahirrnee. I don’t understand accidental/hair triggers but my ex shot himself in the palm “while cleaning his gun” so I know stupid happens. It’s always tragic. Loved ones are left to wonder Why.
Your post was authentic and intriguing. PLEASE tell me what “dipping the blunt in the lean” means.
A blunt is a cigar which has been hollowed out and filled with marijuana, lean is a slang term for codeine cough syrup. So it would mean dipping a marijuana cigar in codeine cough syrup and presumably letting it dry and smoking it.
Yes that is really stupid and likely would have no effect, you’d be better off drinking the codeine syrup and then smoking the blunt but hey kids aren’t smart.
I had to look that one up myself. I know what a blunt is, had no idea about the lean.
I also learned what ‘passing’ is. The only slang I knew before was for an African American passing as white. Now I found out it’s when a boy talks his ‘gf’ into having sex with his friends because if she really loves him she will do them for him.
The funeral was today.
The shooter was charged with voluntary manslaughter.
My father would have agreed with you, he thought everybody should know how to handle a gun and be taught gun safety. One of the main reasons was because you never knew when some teen would want to show off a gun to his friends.
Not a gun hater here. I don’t own any now, but I did in the past and it surely saved me from being robbed and raped, if not killed.
Sixteen is too old for parents to effectively regulate friendships. They are going to hang out with who they want to, especially if they have their own transportation.
And a 24-year-old sounds too old to be hanging out with a 16-year-old, but it’s not shocking to me. If they’d known each other their whole lives, they could could have had a little bro-big bro dynamic going on. Or a “play cousin” relationship, common in close-knit communities.
It’s easy to blame parents for every single thing that goes wrong. We don’t have enough information to do this properly, IMHO.
Trailer parks are not known for their excess of MIT or Harvard graduates. Or any kind of graduates. I’m sorry this happened, but it’s not exactly surprising.
