If you squeeze a trigger when you didn't intend to fire, that is a negligent discharge.
Maybe forty years ago. .22 semi-auto held one-handed by my side slipped as I stood there. I caught it. The bullet missed my foot by at least an inch.Not trying to put anybody on report here but who has had one? What were the circumstances?..Seems a good discussion point, considering some of the other threads...
Ed, you'd flunk.
A good carpenter
I had one at the Trap range. It was a slow evening. I was shooting with a friend...only two of us. I was on station 3 and i was leading off. I put a shell in the chamber, snapped the old BT-99 shut. I had my finger inside the trigger guard....something that I “never” do. As I started to mount the gun, it went off. Blew a hole in the grass about four feet in front of me.Not trying to put anybody on report here but who has had one? What were the circumstances?..Seems a good discussion point, considering some of the other threads...
Hardly.In my 30 plus years of shooting(man I’m getting old)
Please don't take this the wrong way, and I am not saying this disrespectfully, but there's a difference being around guns and shooting your whole life, and being around guns and shooting on a daily basis as part of one's occupation for one's whole (adult) life. I know plenty of very, very experienced folks who do not "practice negligence" but have suffered negligent discharges.Hardly.
I'm 72, and been around guns and shooting my whole life. What's more, the negligent discharge that I had and wrote about earlier in this thread happened almost 60 years ago.
Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying you're due a negligent discharge sooner or later. You're not. Not unless you're in the habit of practicing negligence - which you obviously are not. IMO, anyone who thinks a negligent discharge is inevitable if someone is around guns long enough, is practicing negligence. And they're not doing much for promoting gun ownership either.
^ We’ve all been down this lecture road before.That’s cherry picking a small part of the common definition of accident.
Accident, noun:
1) an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.
2) an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause.
Your definition is only the part I made yellow, but as you can see there is a lot left out if you just look at the yellow text.
Negligence has both a common and a legal definition.
Common: failure to take proper care in doing something.
Legal: failure to use reasonable care, resulting in damage or injury to another.
In the common definition we see the word “proper” which is a subjective judgment. You can refer to anything, including intentionally shooting a chosen target, as negligent if your personal idea of “proper care” is strict enough. For example someone could believe that shooting edible objects as targets for fun is not proper care of food and so everyone who shoots melons and pop bottles is by that standard negligent. They aren’t wrong, they just have different values.
Many of the stories posted here meet the common definition of negligence, as long as “proper care” is defined as following all four rules at all times. That doesn’t mean they aren’t accidents as well.
As for the legal definition of negligence, a few of the stories posted here meet that definition, but it isn’t the majority.
Whenever you have ambiguous words that can have different meanings, and “negligent” with its combination of a common subjective definition and a legal definition that has a specific meaning certainly qualifies as ambiguous when used in an online forum post, there is wisdom in thinking carefully before using that word. There are alternatives such as “unintentional” or “accidental” that are less prone to being twisted to an unintended meaning.
^ We’ve all been down this lecture road before.
It's sort of a windmill for him, isn't it?^ We’ve all been down this lecture road before.
I hardly would -- I spent the latter half of my military career as a small arms instructor, almost all of my law enforcement career as an academy and in-service firearms instructor. That was NOT my point (that they are experts) -- my point was, again, that those whose occupations necessitate a great deal of time spent carrying and shooting are more prone to the "oops" moments than the hobbyist citizen firearms enthusiast who only takes out his/her firearms and/or shoots them under no time pressure and doesn't handle them every day. Okay?With all respect, don't count either military or law enforcement as any kind of firearm experts.
Yes, it certainly stands to reason that more risk exposure will likely result in more occurrences.here's a difference being around guns and shooting your whole life, and being around guns and shooting on a daily basis as part of one's occupation for one's whole (adult) life....
When you are, for example, loading up and leaving the base or station house every morning, and coming back every evening (or at the end of a stress-filled double shift or three days or a week out in the field ... for hours at a time) and then unloading.. ..