Have you ever had a negligent or accidental discharge?

Question

What do you see as the difference between the two?

Were you or anyone else hurt? Property damage?

What was the effect on your handling of firearms afterwards?

Answer 1

I have never, but several months ago I had a friend that did. He had just cleaned one of his 1911 and was cycling through a few rounds to make sure all was well and boom! His finger was nowhere near the trigger and found out his grip safety was not functional. The bullet went though his garage wall, neighbors window pain, a two door folding closet door, gouged out dry wall of one of the walls, through the bedroom door and then fell in the middle of the hall way. No one hurt. Yes he is more cautious when handling his firearms but the real lesson was making sure you take your guns to a real gunsmith and load and test fire the gun at a range before you load it for protection at home or for CCW.

Gun safety is crucial.

Safe shooting all and happy hunting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9bRZTKmh...

Answer 2

There is no difference.  There are only NEGLIGENT discharges because guns do not shoot by themselves.

I have seen several.  There were no injuries or property damage because the offending party practiced the most important rule of gun safety----keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction.  If you do that, then the only thing hurt is pride.

Answer 3

As John Taffin says, there is no such thing as an accidental discharge.  Unless the firearm is defective, they are all negligent discharges.  It sounds kind of rough, but I suppose he's right.

I'm of the opinion that there are two kinds of gun owner, those who have had a negligent discharge, and those who will have a negligent discharge.  If you fool around with guns long enough, you will eventually have a negligent discharge.

I've had two negligent discharges, both cause by the "Just-one-more-time Syndrome."  On both occasions, I'd been practicing my draw with an unloaded gun.  At the end of the session, I reloaded my gun.  A few minutes later, the urge for just one more draw and fire practice overwhelmed good sense and I did it.  Once it broke a window and the other drilled a floppy disk case dead center.  The only thing that saved folks from injury was the fact that I followed proper muzzle discipline.  That is the only thing that can prevent a tragedy.

You can bet the farm that the negligent discharges caused some major changes in gun handling.  Now after quick draw practice, I either change holsters and guns, or take my gun belt off altogether.  It also strongly re-enforced the habit of never pointing a gun's muzzle at anything In didn't want to shoot.

For the life of me I can't figure out why he'd have a shotgun in the bathroom either!

Doc

Answer 4

Accidental discharges, while theoretically possible, really never happen.  An accidental discharge would be a malfunction of the gun that resulted in a discharge with noone or nothing touching it.  A loaded gun, sitting on a shelf, that spontaneously went off.  

If a person is touching it, then they did something to make it go off, and this were negligent.  

I've had a couple of negligent discharges, but since I always observe the big 3 safety rules, there was no danger of anyone being hurt, and no property damage.  And they also served to reaffirm my commitment to safe gun handling!

Answer 5

I do not recognize any discharge as "accidental".  Some discharges are unintentional.  Of these, most are negligent.   Unintentional discharges where there is no property damage or personal injury are near misses and could easily resulted in tragedy.  If the basic rules of firearm safety are followed, there will never be an injury and rarely be any property damage.  Some unintentional discharges are not directly the fault of the person holding the firearm as firearms are mechanical devices and occasionally, these devices wear out or are defective from the manufacturer and the built in safety devices fail.  What is the liability of the person is the direction of the projectile and the resulting effects of it being fired.  

Even if the person can not be held legally liable as the discharge occured through no direct negligent action, I personally feel that they are accountable for where the projectile goes as they have complete ultimate direct control over the muzzle direction.  

I have friends and relatives who had negligent discharges of firearms in their control and one resulted in the severe abdominal injury of a friend and another in the death of my 3 year old cousin.

Answer 6

you see it happen all the time, at the shooting range, you see a lot of holes in the ceiling, you should always treat a gun like it is loaded, even if it is not. I heard of a friend of mine accidentally, shoot the concrete at a trap shooting range with a bird shot, and two bbs went in his leg. He understood, he mis-counted his shots and ASSUMED it was empty. We have gone back though, so I don't think he is that shaken up

Answer 7

Not me but a friend had a Marlin .22 it was loaded and he showed it to me.I asked if it was loaded he picked it up off the rack and shot it through the ceiling.Man I was furious.Didn't talk to him for weeks.

Answer 8

One time i was loading an sks and didn't realize that the firing pin was stuck forward in the bolt. When i dropped the bolt down it fired off 4 rounds before the pin unjammed and stopped.

I'd call it accidental since i was observing all the proper safety rules when it happened and kept it pointed down range. h**l i clamped onto it and held on for dear life as i was expecting it to empty the mag. I was so surprised and gripped it so tight that my hands hurt for the rest of the day.  

From that day forward every time i clean it i shake the bolt to make sure the firing pin is nice and loose.

Answer 9

i've never seen an accidental discharge, seen two that were from negligence. a buddy of mine was playing with a .38 special revolver, twirling it on his finger, spinning the cylinder, closing it, firing. i didn't realize he had a round in it, after ten minutes or so, he misjudged where the round was, and put a hole through an exterior wall at my cousin's house.  don't know if that was so much negligence or just stupidity. probably both.

another time, me and another buddy were out shooting and hiking. he has a walther p22, we were looking at it for some reason, and a round went right past my belly. he felt like h**l, it's lucky i didn't get gut shot, or shot in the wrist on that one.

i've always considered all firearms as loaded, i think these two guys do now...

Answer 10

Personally no but I know of two people who have. I was there for one of them. And I was told of the other one. Nothing happened besides the fright they had.

Shotgun is the bathroom? The question is why not keep a shotgun next to the toilet?

Answer 11

twice

as a kid, dropped an old single barrel exposed hammer shotgun while I was sitting on a tall stump

apparently the hammer caught the edge of the stump as it went down and the gun went off

as an adult, I was at range with a friend who had just bought a new Ruger O/U

he insisted I fire it

I shot once at a clay bird and missed (I am not good with bird gun) and I opened the action to hand it back to him

he insisted I shoot again so I closed the action and pulled the trigger on next bird and nothing happened

we were both confused since it still had a shell loaded - he thought his gun was broken

I dropped the gun down from my shoulder (muzzle up and pointed downrange) and thought "I know I pulled the trigger" and as I thought it, I pulled the trigger and of course the gun fired

scared the #$%^& out of both of us - breaking the action open and closing it had re-c0cked the first barrel so it just went click the first time I pulled the trigger

he didn't know better but I should have

I will never again handle a loaded weapon that I am not familiar with

make that three times - my Uncle shot his car once

had been shooting a 1911, slide locked on last magazine and he laid it down in trunk of car

went off and blew a hole through fender

no idea how it happened - slide was locked open and he didn't pull the trigger - obviously still had one round left

Answer 12

I've been shooting for sixteen years now, and I have never had an unintentional discharge.  I don't know if that could be attributed more to luck than anything else, but I hope that whatever it is continues.

Answer 13

I once had an old muzzle loader that finally fired about 10 sec. after I pulled the trigger. No one was hurt, but I about crapped in my camos.

Answer 14

I shot myself with a BB gun once.  At the time, I really didn't think of a BB gun as a "real" gun, but when I shot myself it made me realize that I should be s******g around with any sort of projectile weapon.

I was s******g around with a pump BB gun.  I thought there were no BBs in it and for some reason, I was pumping it up and discharging the air, blowing the air out the barrel on myself (I have no idea why I was doing that..stupidity doesn't begin to describe it).  After a few times of doing this, I did it again and this time, a BB made it in the chamber.  I pulled the trigger and put a BB in my thigh.  Boy did that bleed like h*ll for about a day.

Ever since then, I will not even handle a firearm without opening the action, looking in the chamber and looking in the magazine for a round.  I've had a few misfires since then where I sat with the barrel downrange for a few minutes, but I've never had a ND since.  The closest thing I've had to an ND since was the first time I shot a Savage with the Accu-Trigger.  I was expecting the trigger to have some mechanical slack in it.  I was at a bench with a 300WSM and I was trying to take the mechanical slack out of the trigger for my first shot with my new rifle.  I found out there was no slack in the trigger when the gun went off before I anticipated it.  I had the gun pointed at the target and I knew I was pulling a trigger on a loaded weapon, so it really wasn't an ND.  The only thing that happened was I missed the target and darn near peed my pants.

An experience with a relatively harmess BB gun changed me for life.  I know you can get seriously hurt with a BB gun, but in the end, nothing was really hurt besides my pride.

As far as the difference between an accidental discharge and a negligent discharge...IMHO

I think of an accidental discharge being the result of a mechanical failure.  If someone does a bad trigger job, I drop the rifle while deer hunting, and the firing pin strikes as a result where it really shouldn't have, I'd call that an accidental discharge.  I'd call a slam fire an AD as well.

I think of a negligent discharge as something that is the direct result of the human element.  A person not knowing the firearm was loaded and pulling the trigger is a ND.  Someone who pulls the trigger on a loaded weapon with the safety on for something to do while hunting and the gun goes off...that is an ND.  The person who ties a rope around the trigger to bring a loaded weapon up into a treestand and it goes off, that is a ND.