As a shooter and former firearms trainer, it really irks me to see stories in the news that indicate guns firing by themselves, as if they suddenly come to life. Case in point — headline from the Associated Press: Two Wounded at Los Angeles School When Gun in Backpack Fires. Now, the story seems to be that the gun fired when the backpack was dropped. There is no mention of the make and model of gun, so it is hard to speculate how that might happen. My point is that it probably had help. Most modern guns need a very deliberate sequence of action to fire. Yet the press continues to report these incidents as if guns are magical, self-operating devices with murderous urges.
The other genre of guns-firing-by-themselves stories involves the classic “the gun fired when I was cleaning it” variety. A similar theme was reported in a news story I read yesterday in my own region of the country. The introductory sentence of the article goes something like this: “A Grand Forks resident was cited this morning for discharging his firearm within city limits after he accidentally shot himself in his home while attempting to move his handgun.” The story goes that the man was cleaning his apartment in the wee hours of the morning and when he moved his handgun, it fired, striking him in the hand. The story reports the man’s first name was Darwin.
GUNS DO NOT FIRE THEMSELVES. Accidental discharges are certainly (remotely) possible, but are mostly due to negligence. I have heard a story, for instance, in which a man shot himself in the leg with a single action revolver because he had it stored in the console of his pickup in a sock. Evidently, in the process of things moving around with the gun in the console, the single action hammer was cocked back, and when the man moved some other things around in the console, he caught the trigger in the fabric of the sock and fired it. Knowing the full context in that story, it is somewhat believable, but the person who shot himself was certainly negligent in how he was storing a loaded gun, as was the high school kid in Los Angeles.
Stories I generally approach with suspicion are the ones where police officers and/or security guards cleaning their weapons at home experience accidental discharges. Those people have obviously been trained to know better, and what I usually envision behind those stories is either boredom or drunkenness leading to quick-draw practice or other unsafe stunts that lead to the discharge.
I hope for a day when the mainstream media writes gun stories with factual information and avoids personifying and/or demonizing mechanical objects.
