My dad only taught me to disable weapons.
I think now I am an adult I could probably put them together, Lego style, but he taught me to take them apart.
I am very grateful for this skill, even though I have only come across weapons on a very, very rare basis. And in each case the owner was there.
If I can, I will teach my son the same thing. How to disable the gun.
I don’t care if he gets into guns, I only care he knows how to keep them safe.
I did not mean to excuse his utter lack of respect for between-the-knees firearms handling. I was more concerned about why he was firing into the crowd, seemingly randomly. And he kept yelling “back” although I doubt that anyone on the scene had any idea what he was yelling, even though there was a pretty good buffer of space and nobody was posing a threat to the ICE personnel.
That they’re standing upright upright makes them a threat.
Alcoholic Texas Man Shoots and Kills Daughter, Jury Declines to Indict
Bold mine
Bodycam footage of police arriving at the house following the shooting showed Mr Harrison saying the gun 'went off’ as he was showing it to his daughter.
‘We were getting ready to go to the airport and we were talking about guns,’ he tells the officer as a shocked-looking Mr Littler stands with his hands behind the back of his neck.
‘I got it out and it just went off as she stood there,’ Mr Harrison continued.
‘It was in the bedside cabinet in a locked box. I took it out to look and it just went off.’
I have never owned a gun. Do they just go off? That sounds dangerous. They must be going off all the time, like when they’re carried in holsters, stored in safes, or unloaded, or when they are loaded and pointed at someone’s heart.
Oh, and
In his own written statement, Mr Harrison – who is not attending the hearing – said he had drunk a 500ml carton of white wine that morning.
After finishing it he dumped the empty container in a bin beside a 7/11 store.
But he said he believed he had finished drinking it before 10am and was not impaired by alcohol when his daughter was shot shortly before 3pm.
Moderating:
With 4 flags for this misplaced post, I moved it from the In residential construction why aren't water pipes insulated? thread to its own thread.
I am now clearing the flags.
@CookingWithGas can contact myself or any other Mod to move this to another forum or even close it.
I assume that it is more common for the guns of drunks to ‘just go off’ than it would be for non-drunks.
I see a British Coroner has declared it “unlawful killing on the grounds of gross negligent manslaughter” which perhaps reflects the different legal attitudes towards people pointing guns at other people, accident or not. That coroner’s report would lead to him being charged in England. If it had happened here.
They fought over Trump. Or it was typical careless gun handling. Both are valid excuses in Texas.
/not entirely sarcasm.
I am SO sorry. This was intended to go in Stupid Gun News of the Day
No problem, I’ll move it there now.
In a word, no.
In complex reality, allowing for various factors, temperature, humidity, political climate…no.
The only way a non-defective gun “goes off” is if you pull the trigger. And most guns are not defective.
Anybody that says “I was just holding it and it went off, killing the person I was just having an argument with, accidentally”, is lying.
Generally no, they don’t just go off. That is extremely dangerous. The Sig P320 has a reputation for accidental discharges and Sig’s reputation has been damaged quite a bit because of it (Sig’s handling of the situation has also been less than ideal).
That said, there are two types of safeties on guns, those that completely prevent the gun from being fired and those that don’t. Both are designed to prevent accidental discharges, but the design philosophy is different for each.
Both types prevent accidental discharge from dropping the weapon (or at least they are supposed to… cough looking at you Sig cough). The difference is that if you intend to fire the weapon, you have to disable the safety on the first type, and don’t have to on the second type.
The news article says that the gun was a Glock pistol. They did not say what model, but Glocks generally fall in the second category. If you drop the pistol or mishandle it, it won’t accidentally fire. But if you pull the trigger, it will fire. The pistol can’t tell the difference between you intentionally pulling the trigger or accidentally pulling the trigger.
Some people consider this type of safety to be less safe, but it’s not unique to Glock pistols. Most revolvers for example have what is called a “safety bar” inside. The bar blocks the hammer from striking the firing pin, so if you drop the revolver or accidentally catch the hammer on something and pull it halfway back and release it, the revolver won’t fire. It’s only when you pull the trigger that the safety bar gets moved out of the way and the hammer can strike the firing pin and fire the weapon. There are plenty of other safety designs as well, such as grip safeties, trigger safeties, etc.
So it’s entirely possible that the gun “just went off” because the guy accidentally pulled the trigger.
It’s also possible that the gun had some sort of mechanical problem that prevented the safeties from working properly. In that case, the gun could just go off.
There are four basic rules for gun safety. They are:
Every gun owner should have all four of these memorized and should practice them religiously.
If you take this guy at his word, he still broke rule 2. Even if the gun had malfunctioned and accidentally discharged, if all four rules had been followed, no one would have been hurt.
I’m not sure I believe him though.
Is it just the Sig P320? Some YouTube ‘expert’ has said that there are maybe 5 others?
There are several pistols that have had recalls due to accidental discharges. It’s usually early versions of a new model that have the issue. Once the issue is found and fixed, a recall is issued, and it’s generally no biggie. In Sig’s case, Sig refuses to issue a recall and says there is no issue, and Sig’s position has been very widely criticized, which is why I singled them out. The P320 has also been in the news a lot lately, most recently since it was the gun that Alex Pretti was carrying. This is also not the first time that an accidental discharge from a P320 has made the national news.
A lot of very popular older pistols are also not drop-safe, like the Model 1911, the Browning Hi Power, or the Walther PPK. These guns have safeties on them that prevent an accidental trigger pull, but they don’t have any sort of mechanism to block the hammer if the trigger isn’t pulled. If you drop them, depending on how they land, the hammer can bounce enough to cause an accidental discharge.
Maybe “inadvertently” would be a better way to put it.
I guess my question wasn’t sufficiently sarcastic. You hear about guns just “going off” all the time, and they never just “go off” because when that happens it’s always in someone hand.
Well, it was the killer’s story. He thought people would believe it.
Like so many people that manage to “accidentally” kill themselves while cleaning their guns. Fiction.
I need to work on my sarcasm skills. Every time you hear about a gun just “going off” there is a very high probability that it was in someone’s hand, and they pulled the trigger. That doesn’t mean they intended to, but it was an act of recklessness.
I think that you are right. It’s not locked in its case. The owners put the rounds in with their fingers. Someone was playing around with a loaded gun and there is no excuse for that.
Although with the hammer back a dropped M1911A1 can have it jarred off of the sear, even with the hammer forward if the drop is muzzle-down the firing pin is massive enough that momentum can carry it forward fast enough to ignite the primer.
There are after-market tungsten firing pins that are supposed to be light enough to prevent this plus stronger springs, ditto. Some manufacturers have added block for positive prevention but Springfield Armory, the most popular, has not.