You really don't know what you are talking about
Nice. Also incorrect... which is, I suppose, why you edited your statement. Anyway... moving on...
Beatnik,
The distinction between accidental and negligent doesn't really aid in preventing incidents like this. In fact it may interfere with that message and prevent proper preperation. If you tell someone, "accidents are mechanical, everything else is negligent," they can conclude, "So long as I keep my stuff in good repair and am super conscientious nothing bad will ever happen." That is an incorrect conclusion caused by an incorrect premise.
In fact from a safety perspective it might be better to stress the accidental nature of discharges because it keeps people from saying "I trust myself therefore nothing bad will happen."
Bad stuff happens. Mechanical devices fail. People fail. You can't prevent that... all you can do is teach people ways of dealing with those realities. Teach people to do things that will reduce the harm, like the sand bucket. I have a planter (filled with sand) in my 2nd floor apartment for just that reason... it gives me a known safe target and if I ever do make a mistake it will limit the harm. There are other things you can do to mitigate against disaster.
But not if you black and white the issue with "everything is negligence".
Beyond that, I do think it will bite us that a few gunners have decided to classify everything as negligence even when they don't know any of the facts. All we really know in this case is that his hand was shot. For all we know he was playing stupid games (spin the glock) and used the "cleaning" excuse because he was embarrassed. It is equally possible that he did have an accident of some sort. I'm not ruling out negligence by any means but to jump up and say categorically that it was is absurd.
The use of negligence as every explanation isn't even good training. When learning a physical skill like flying you are taught about many mistakes, and you are taught how to deal with many situations. You are taught how to watch for traffic, how to land the plane, and so on. Every year many people fail to live up to that training and they die. Some of them are negligent. Others are NOT. The negligent people are just a warning... don't be stupid, bad stuff will happen. That's all they are. That leaves you other cases, other incidents, you can learn from where the issue wasn't negligence and it wasn't (entirely) equipment failure... it was a sequence of events that were not handled correctly. Usually those sequences start with something minor going wrong in a way that could have been dealt with, but the error isn't caught and so the situation becomes disasterous. In the end the fault still goes back to the pilot but because you are paying attention to the sequence of events instead of stamping every incident "negligence" you can learn more about what to do.
Accidents happen without mechanical failure and without negligence. Was this one of those? I don't know.
