imported post
Doug Huffman wrote:
Is that Dr. WaPo Guns' finger I'm lookin' at?
I will admit to three accidental discharges in my 30 years shooting, and all were jokes rather than tragedies because, though I violated Rules 1, 3 and 4, I had trained myself to be very uncomfortable if the muzzle wandered toward something human.
3. Don't put your finger on the trigger until you're ready to shoot. This is probably the hardest to obey, because the ergonomics of the gun make the trigger lure the finger onward, toward destruction, and it's so easy to forget. And the bullet once fired can never be recalled.
There are no accidents with a key in the ignition or a round chambered but only negligence.
Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where the will, with wits and guns and the truth. NRA KMA$$
I prefer to state it another way. Plane crashes, car crashed, and unintended discharges are never the result of one thing; a series of events led to an unsafe condition, which led to tragedy. One slip-up could be called an accident; a systemic and long-chain series of failures cannot.
That said, the way you state it makes for good conversation. People don't like being called incompetent. When you say that any unintended discharge of a weapon is negligent by definition, people have no excuse. People also don't like having no excuse for their actions. Thus, theargument that all UDs are negligent is what prompts counterarguments blaming the gun; either our premise is wrong, and humans are blameless thus imbuing the gun with some sort of intelligent self-control, or our premise is right, and thus for that reason and because humans are fallible,a gunis an object that by its very nature is unsafe in human handsand should be banned.
As for "Dr. Gun", he certainly did give the straight dope; I don't think I'd come up with answers much different than his to the questions posed. I think the piece still had a slight anti-gun bias because the preponderance of questions asked were honestly answered with "then you shouldn't have a gun". People read the first paragraph and "know" what the rest of it's going to say; it's how we're taught in school, your thesis should come first and then yourreasons behind it. Many people wouldn't have gotten to "if you're nervous around guns, go to the range and practice with them" which is great advice.
