I think that most news articles mentioning gun “cleaning” mishaps are repeating the self-serving lie the perp gave them.
The gun was being fiddled with, not cleaned. Generally speaking, you clean them by first taking them at least somewhat apart. In more detail, first you unload them, then you disassemble them some, then you clean the collection of parts. It’s the fiddling before or during the unloading that gets people. Or the reload at the other end if you store them loaded. Itself a risky move unless you’ve got good secure storage.
When the perp and victim are the same person, “cleaning” is a common euphemism for suicide attempt whether successful or not.
Yes. The type of action used by the likes of Glock and the Taurus G series has no way of making the striker be no longer “cocked” under spring tension other than by letting it go; and to strip the gun you need nothing to be pressing the sears and safeties from the ready-to-fire position, so the instructions are first unload and clear, then press the trigger to un-set the striker. These types of “cleaning” NDs are almost universally a case of not doing the proper sequence of first remove mag, then cycle slide twice to ensure no round chambered, LOOK from the back of the open slide to make sure, then do the striker drop, but also did not start already pointing in a safe direction.
In the Bend elementary school shooting thread, someone already praised the good guy with a gun for limiting it to 5 dead. Will that story make the “positive gun news of the day” thread? That person also lamented that this story will drop off the news because of said “good guy with gun”.
The “good guy” aspect gives me mixed feelings. We know nothing about the “hero.” Was he expertly trained, or just lucky that he didn’t kill another kid?
We don’t know any of that yet, that I know. My main point was that a positive “good guy with a gun” story that ends up with 5 dead and 2 more critically wounded is still a very shitty, bad story. An armed society is a dead society.
I don’t disagree. But it’s possible a lot more people would have been killed or injured had the Good Guy with a Gun™ not shown up. It’s too early to know for sure.
For that matter, we know that a guy with a gun was killing kids, a guy with a gun got killed, and a guy with a gun survived. How certain are we of which guy with a gun was which?
Here’s a dumbass story from the brilliant police officers employed by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. A person was attempting self-harm inside a vehicle, so an officer attempted to gain entry by using his firearm to break the window. The gun discharged, though I don’t believe anyone was struck. (The emotionally disturbed individual was stabbing themselves.)
(Link to another story in case the first one is paywalled.)
911 call comes in for active shooter. Police arrive. They see three dead children, a dead teacher, and two guys walking around brandishing guns. What are they going to do?
There was a case like that in an Alabama shopping mall and they shot and killed the “good guy with a gun.”
The people doing the security briefing for us back in 2023 were very insistent on that: you don’t want to be “unidentified armed guy who is not one of us” when SWAT shows up.
Agreed. And while the officer evidently did not do a very good pat-down, to his credit he managed to quickly subdue the assailant without gunning him down.
IOW, he managed to do what many police do not.
Watching the video, it was fairly evident to me that if the kid was going to shoot, he already would have. Ergo, he probably wasn’t going to shoot, and was [stupidly] trying to intimidate the loss-prevention officer into releasing them. Many, if not most, cops would not take any chance, though, and would have immediately shot him multiple times.
Kudos to this officer for not doing that. He should serve as an example to other cops.