The witty banter between the two gravediggers/clowns in Hamlet as Ophelia’s coertege approaches is a riff on when and how the concept should be applied.
(heavily snipped)
I find it hard to believe that anyone would find intentional suicide to be protecting the good name of the victim/perpetrator, as opposed to a “whoopsies” whilst cleaning his weapon. Accidents happen to everyone, and suicide isn’t generally considered admirable (at least in most Western cultures) unless someone has done something horribly egregious and agrees with the popular consensus that they don’t deserve life.
Just a thought.
I left out a word. What I meant to say was “there is often considerable pressure on the medical examiner not to rule the case a suicide”.
I’m unimpressed with claims by insurance company doctors and lawyers that all gun cleaning incidents are intentional suicides. While it certainly does happen from time to time, we can never really know what the intentions of a dead person were in the absence of a communication.
Your skepticism would have more foundation if it was only these folks making the argument - but as noted it’s the conclusion of experienced forensic pathologists with no connection to insurance companies that these cases overwhelmingly represent suicide.
See post #20.
I didn’t realize my “new” migraine med was a barbituate (boring story, but I’d assumed it was like ergotamine). The first time I took it, I considered taking a Vicodin and an Advil just in case it didn’t really work. (My doctor had previously ok’d taking Vicodin and Advil for my migraines.) And I woulda’, too, if I hadn’t passed out from the barbituate first!
Not sure if that would’ve been enough to kill me, but that’s about as close to accidental death as I wish to come. :eek:
Notwithstanding the old chestnut of a joke, it’s barbiturate.
Oh. I was high when I typed that.
It says so right here in this note!
Case closed.
Seriously, though, I’m sure they just leave gun-cleaning supplies lying around the scene.
John Hiatt would.
Am I the only one with this Sounds-Like-Early-Angry-Elvis-Costello song reverberating through this thread?
Well, you could do some statistical analysis, I guess. If it is indeed common for guns to fire accidentally while cleaning them, then fatal accidents must be only a small subset of the injuries inflicted, because there are vastly more ways for a (non-aimed, accidental) gun injury to be non-fatal. If you find a suspiciously large number of gun-cleaning accidents result in (say) fatal head wounds, you might be righteously suspicious. I am no gun expert, but I’m willing to guess that no part of the cleaning process truly requires peering down the barrel with your hand on the trigger.
Of course, this statistical analysis would face a lot of noise issues, because likely a ton of the non-fatal gun-cleaning injuries were really “I was fooling around with the gun in an unsafe fashion and it went off, so I broke out the cleaning supplies after I called 911.”
Look, the only way to “shoot yourself while cleaning your gun” is if at some point during the cleaning process you point the gun at yourself and pull the trigger. That is the only possible way it can happen. Therefore, there are two options. One, the person was so ignorant and careless of firearms safety that they accidentally pointed the gun at themselves and pulled the trigger. Or two, they deliberately pointed the gun at themselves and pulled the trigger.
There are no other options.
While I am generally of the opinion that many of these “accidents” are disguised suicides, I lack your confidence that there’s no possible way it can happen. There are a lot of strange accidents in the world. I knew a lady whose husband shot himself setting his gun down wrong (he lived) and I’ve read reports of a man shot by his Labrador retriever stepping on the firearm. There’s the famous video of the cop demonstrating gun safety to a classroom who shoots himself in the leg while saying he’s the only person in the room qualified to handle a gun safely. And I’ve personally witnessed someone demonstrating gun safety, who didn’t realize the gun was pointed at me during the talk until I pointed that out, who then confidently asserted that the gun was still safe because it wasn’t loaded yet, and who demonstrated this by opening the chamber…to discover a live round. People make mistakes when they get comfortable.
They sure do make mistakes. But the mistake is mistakenly pointing the gun at someone and mistakenly pulling the trigger. The famous cop who shot himself in the foot had his loaded gun pointed at his foot, and pulled the trigger.
The guy who pointed the loaded gun at you might have negligently pointed the gun at you, but he actually pointed the gun at you. But the only way he could have shot you is if he also negligently pulled the trigger while negligently pointing the gun at you.
And if someone does that, I contend it’s something different than “The gun accidentally went off and Sailboat got shot”. Rather, it’s “I negligently pointed the gun at Sailboat and I negligently pulled the trigger and so I shot Sailboat.”
While you’re correct that there are a lot of strange accidents in the world, I’m with Lemur866. None of the examples you’ve provided is a strange accident; rather, they are all instances of negligence.
I’m not familiar with the case of the guy setting his gun down “wrong,” but I’ll bbet he had his finger on the trigger (and the safety off) at the time.
Hunter shot by Lab? I heard of that one. Hunter tosses gun over fence, and climbs over; dog steps on trigger, and because hunter had left safety off, the gun discharges. Not a strange accident, just negligence.
Cop shoots self in leg during firearms safety demo? He pointed the gun at his leg with his finger on the trigger and the safety off, and then (whether he meant to or not), he pulled the trigger. Not a strange accident, just negligence.
Gun pointed at you with a round in the chamber? Not strange, just negligence.
Sometimes they are just accidents. Safeties fail. Some people are just careless. With older single action revolvers one is advised to carry with the hammer resting on an empty chamber or spent round. Hitting the hammer can cause an unintentional discharge…
…which is why you’re never supposed to point a gun at anything you don’t want to kill.
Terry Kath’s last words were, “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded.” You’ve got to admit there’s something unhinged about pointing a gun at your temple and pulling the trigger, even if you really think it’s not loaded.
Right. Safeties fail. And this is why you don’t point the gun at yourself, nor do you pull the trigger. Even when the safety is on. Even when you have good reason to believe the gun isn’t loaded.
If you want to argue that some people are so careless that they can unintentionally shoot themselves, well, it’s true. But they shoot themselves by carelessly pointing the gun at themselves and carelessly pulling the trigger.
I have to agree with the idea that most of the “gun cleaning” deaths are probably suicide. I can see a safety possibly failing, but even in those cases, they’d still have to negligently point the gun at themselves, which isn’t necessary when cleaning, after having begun cleaning without being absolutely sure the gun is unloaded.
The number one rule of gun safety is to always treat a gun as if it’s loaded, perhaps excepting cases where you’ve personally verified it and, as a corolary, you never point a gun at anything unless you intend to destroy it. Hell, I’ve handled guns plenty of times, and even when after personally inspecting and being sure it’s not loaded, I still won’t point the barrel at myself unless for some strange reason it’s absolutely unavoidable.
Now, I can see some random idiot mishandling a gun, like maybe tossing it onto a table with the safety off and shooting themselves, but I also would tend to think that someone who cares enough to clean their gun is probably more aware of gun safety than someone who isn’t. Moreover, cleaning a gun doesn’t involve any rough handling, doesn’t require it be pointed at you, and requires you unload it anyway or you can’t clean the chamber or clip. As such, I’d expect most accidental shots from cleaning to probably be in the hands, arms, or legs, whereas, I suspect a lot of the gun cleaning deaths are probably vastly disproportionately head shots.
Besides, if you’re going to kill yourself, but don’t want people to know it was intentional, what other options do you have? Sure, you have the single car crash option, but not only is there a fairly high risk of it not being fatal, but you destroy a car and damage property, not to mention put others at risk. Maybe you could “accidentally” OD, but if you don’t do drugs and suddenly OD on something, that would raise a lot of questsion. Guns, however, are extremely effective and are quick and probably relatively painless because of how quick they are and the gun cleaning excuse is perfect and easy to pull off… just “forget” a round in it, start cleaning it, and “accidentally” discharge it while it’s a couple feet away from your head. Even if people see through it, there’s still doubt because that leaves no difference between the few real accidental cases, whereas something like an intentional crash or an OD tends to leave more obvious, like the aforementioned lack of tire marks.
On that note, I wonder how effective disguising an intentional suicide as autoerotic asphyxiation would be? Assuming you’re not afraid of being remembered for that and are more afraid of letting people know it was intentional, just pull your pants down, lay out some porn, and hang yourself. Any ideas on what some tell-tale signs might be, other than typical potential suicide signs? It seems relatively foolproof.
And at the OP, I’d just go with suicide, possibly with a clarification of accidental. It has gotten the conotation that it’s an intentional self-inflicted death, but just how homicide doesn’t necessarily mean that person was killed intentionally, neither does suicide. And while I think a term like “death by misadventure” is probably a bit more interesting, it seems to describe a subset of accidental suicides where someone was knowingly doing something with high risk and it went bad, particularly stunts. Such a term, to me, does not include suicides like falling asleep at the wheel, slamming into a telephone pole when trying to dodge a deer, since driving isn’t inherently high risk, and they weren’t really knowingly doing it under the assumption that they could die.