Where guns are involved, there are no accidental deaths. Only negligence.
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Unfortunately this is incorrect.
Firearms do sometimes malfunction, and that is indeed an accident.
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And still a very bad way to secure a weapon.
Dry-firing is one brain-fart away from live firing. Dry-firing is a form of playing with guns as if they were toys. Please no one do this as a regular method of securing.
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Ugh, yeah. At what percentage rate compared to deaths resulting from negligence?
Letâs not confuse the wildly rare with the relatively common.
I try to make sure I donât need a car when Iâm thinking about places to move to. Itâs certainly not an option for everyone, so thatâs no judgement of anyone else. Still, I know that if I make a mistake on my bike, I may die (and maybe the kids would too, if Iâm taking them in the trailer, although thatâs unlikely to happen on the pavement). Itâs very unlikely that I would kill another person though, which has always disturbed me much more than the idea of dying myself. I can live with my own death (figuratively speaking). I do rent a car if Iâm travelling, but try to limit it as much as possible. The sooner self-driving cars come, the better.
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Itâs probably still a good idea not to call them accidents though, in the same way that car collisions probably shouldnât be called accidents.
That is exactly the point.
The brain fart then translates to a bullet going in a safe(r) direction and making noise and minor damage. Without it, there is a risk of it going in an unintended direction and causing real mayhem.
It is not a replacement to the regular securing, an important point. It is an addition.
Stack the probabiliites.
Failure of quality control
or failure of maintenance
or failure to follow proper procedures
In management theory, all are preventable. An accident is something that could not have been prevented, such as a meterorite strike or a tsunami.
âAccidentâ is most often used as a weasel word to try to avoid responsibility, as in âcar accidentâ, which in over 90% of cases equates to âdriver negligence.â
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In reality, of course, you do get it - and just wish that you didnât. The ability to take a life is a form of power, and having that power - even if you donât exercise it (or canât) - goes some way towards calming the sense of desperation that one feels in a world that is bewildering and unfair. In reality, of course, your oppressors arenât going to bash down your door and threaten your family. They control the situation more fundamentally and more subtly than that. In fact, a lot of insurgency seems to me to revolve around trying to engineer situations where governments must indeed resort to crude, naked force - firstly because in doing so they in turn expose their resources to violence, and secondly because itâs actually a crap way of keeping people in line.
The risk is (and I think thatâs what we observe with these mass shootings) is that a similar process can occur on a personal level if you buy a gun to ensure your âfreedomâ - pushed hard enough or feel transgressed against enough, and you end up picking up the tool youâve chosen and trying to use it. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
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NYC didnât ban locking blades, but blades that can be flicked open with one hand.
Me. Elementary school. Family library well stocked with medical and herbal knowledge.
This works. You can soak much more abuse from your beloved classmates when you know how to poison the cafeteria tea tank,
I think it is semantics. An accident is something you didnât mean to have happen. Most accidents could have been avoided, and probably most accidents are due to some sort of negligence. I still think they are accidents, even though someone can be labeled as at fault for their actions.
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âŚwithout considering the size of the risk of a particular failure. That pretty much sums up casual gun ownership.
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Failure tradeoff. Without a dry click, risk of sending the projectile in a random direction. With it, risk of a hole in a designated tree or couch or sand or other nearby object that can absorb the energy without much damage.
If the previous step did not fail, you get no bad outcome here. Nothing happens.
If the step failed, you get a minor controlled damage instead of a risk of uncontrolled one.
Whatâs so difficult to understand?
I understand very well the variations of risk, and can cite your invocation of a couch-stop as a very poor understanding of risk on the part of a casual gun hobbyist.
Then I saw a new banana and a new peel, for the first banana and the first peel had passed away, and there was no longer any bOING.
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Hereâs a problem, though. If you havenât made a mistake previously, the probability that youâre going to get a âbangâ is 0%. So youâre not really stacking any probabilities in that case.
If you have made a mistake, the probability is 100% that you will get a âbangâ. So, now, the probabilities involved are only those for two cases:
a) if youâd not pulled the trigger, the probability that someone in the future would accidentally discharge it in an unsafe direction
vs
b) the probabilities that the direction youâre purposefully discharging it in is unsafe
This doesnât so much seem like a stacking of probabilities, as much as forcing the resolution of the probabilities in advance. Which is unlikely to be a bad thing if youâre talking about military protocol with loads of drills to ensure that itâs forced in as safe a way as possible, but for an average person in the US the situation becomes a LOT more murky.
I wouldnât stack any probabilities. I wouldnât âtestâ the gun. Iâd clear the gun, and then if I wanted to feel the trigger action, Iâd cock it, aim it in a safe direction, flick the safety and pull the trigger. All yâall are engaging in sophistry. Donât test the gun. Clear the gun. Itâs a gun. We already know it goes bang. We already know it goes bang if thereâs a bullet in the chamber. So donât test it. Just clear it.
If you want to feel its action, that is a separate matter.
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