How about polishing the hand cannon.
Or if they succeed and the family wants to collect life insurance. Insurance companies always claim that gun cleaning deaths are suicide attempts. I have, however, seen a Youtube of a guy accidentally shoot himself (just his hat) while looking at a gun barrel. Something called a “hang-fire” if I recall correctly.
That does make the most sense.
There was another patient on the same show – a little kid who had been shot in the pelvis. They didn’t get into how that might have happened.
One of my favorite Onion headlines:
Husband mounts trophy wife
My policy is that a gun is always loaded until I have verified that it is not. It remains unloaded only for as long as it remains in my sole and uninterrupted control. If it leaves my possession even for an instant I treat it as if it were loaded until I have verified it is not. If I leave the room in an empty house to take a leak when I return I recheck the weapon. An undetected intruder may have loaded the weapon in my absence either maliciously or in a moment of whimsy. They can be such scamps.
Yeah, the non-logic behind this stuns me. Hey, I just fired my gun, but the bullet didn’t come out. I’ll look down the barrel!
Elmer Fudd did it all the time!
This. Look, I know I am prone to bouts of clumsiness or distractedness. Which makes me even more careful when I am actually handling the gun.
I think people forget that in the end it is a killing device! It can be used for a lot of other things but the primary purpose is still to shoot to kill.
It is pretty much a given in forensic pathology that this scenario = suicide staged to look like an accident, >99% of the time.
This one perhaps?
Sure it was a suicide?
We’re watching the Great Courses class on Forensics, and the case that just came up involved a guy found in the woods with the side of his head blown off and a rifle nearby. looked like a clear suicide. But he was too short to have pulled the trigger in that position. They went back to his house and his wife, and used some of the chemicals to find blood residue - and found that the wall was covered by it. Turned out his wife killed him, dragged him to the truck, dragged the bloody mattress to the truck by herself, and dumped him and then it in the woods with the scene set to look like a suicide.
The teacher mentioned that many suicide by rifle involved rigging up something to pull the trigger.
Yes.
True, like looking to see if the bullet was loaded correctly at the other end.
He’ll get a Darwin award in no time.
Modern guns don’t go off when dropped unless the trigger catches on something. By “modern” I mean older than most people mean. Drop safeties are in all guns for about 50 years and probably pretty common before then. It sounds like either stupid negligent discharge or a regretted suicide attempt. I hope people realize that using a .22 for this purpose not sufficient for the job (not to encourage thoroughness!)
That’s not really an idiosyncratic thing, though. It’s officially the first rule!
Apart from dealing improperly with a dud round (like looking down the barrel to see if that will help) I can’t think of any situation that calls for the muzzle pointing anywhere near your own face. Anytime during cleaning when I HAVE looked down the muzzle was only after the action was disassembled and I’d already run a few swabs and a brush through from muzzle to breach–pretty safe bet there’s no round in there.
To shoot yourself in the face on accident you’d have to start by locking open the action (with the intent of letting light into the breach so you could see through from the muzzle) which would expel any round in the breach. If you’re dumb enough to do this with another round in the magazine, I suppose it’s possible for the action to slip and chamber that round. But then you’d have to respond to that terrifying sound by grabbing the trigger. Not saying it’s an impossible sequence of events, but if it does happen then you are too stupid AND unlucky to own a gun.
[quote=“Richard_Pearse, post:30, topic:715202”]
This one perhaps?
[/QUOTE]That might be the same one I saw, but I seem to remember a very close camera framing. This one appears edited.
I was told by an EMT around here (northwest Arkansas) that every year there’s a few leg or foot injuries from guys playing quick draw. But they were just cleaning their handgun.
Not reliably sufficient. It can do the job, but only if you aim it just right, otherwise, it’s deformity and too many surgeries.
I have an acquaintance whose father successfully killed himself with an pellet/BB gun. Probably an outlier, but stuff happens.
This or possibly a botched suicide. I know of at least two incidents that went down in the books as “self-inflicted hunting injury” that were suicide attempts; one worked and one didn’t.
I go you one better. The gun is always loaded, period. It doesn’t matter that I may have just taken the cartridge out of the chamber. I still treat it as if it were loaded and ready to fire. I’m superstitious about this!
I could no more point a gun, even unloaded, at another person than I could fly. Unless, of course, he needed killin’.