Fun With Guns: Annie Oakley Edition
A Florida woman accidentally shot herself during a marksmanship competition. Seriously.
Siegried Betterly, 40, was injured while participating in a timed shooting competition at the Volusia County Gun and Hunt Club on State Road 44, said Volusia Sheriff spokesman Gary Davidson.
Davidson said as Betterly was putting her 9 mm handgun into her holster, she accidentally touched the trigger, and a bullet hit her in the leg.
I’m thinking she lost, right?
I know zilch about 9mm handguns, but if they shoot when you “touch the trigger,” that is one dangerous piece of metal.
Gun people are like religious people– there are probably plenty of them out there quietly doing the right thing, but it’s the idiots and loudmouths who get in the news and make them all look bad.
1Another responsible gun owner.
2What is that Air Force recruitment motto……. let me see….oh yeah,Aim Higher. Getting shot must not hurt much as so many responsible gun own….er dingbats are shooting themselves.
3Hey, she hit what she was aiming at… If only her leg had been armed.
4Honestly folks. I cant discern which of the bazillions of 9mm she might have been toting, but assuming the handgun isn’t somehow broke, it takes a touch amounting to a squeeze to fire off a round. Truth be known, she paid no attention that she had her bloody paw on the trigger and squeezed. And the handgun did what handguns do. It went bang!
5Is it smart to holster a gun with one in the chamber? Another neglectful person who shouldn’t be near loaded weapon. And “the investigators determined the shooting was accidental”. In a pig’s eye
6@Maryelle: I don’t know how to react to this flood of nonsensical handgun discharges. I can say this: I carried a caliber .45 Colt semi-automatic seven days a week from January 1974 to the early 2000s. Every time it went bang it was because I knowingly and intentionally pulled the trigger. That amounted to 2 or 3 times on the street and thousands of times training on the range.
7“Is it smart to holster a gun with one in the chamber?”
Oh, that isn’t so bad, although I doubt it is the best thing to do. What’s going on is that people don’t just have “one in the chamber” THEY KEEP THE GODDAM GUN “COCKED”!!!
It’s not easy to pull a trigger through the full stroke (drawing back and releasing the hammer or pin) by accident. But when a gun is “cocked” any slight move of the trigger (‘hair trigger’) will fire it. If the gun is jarred, dropped or mishandled, it WILL FIRE. Just sliding it into a holster can do it.
Now, can anybody find me any gun safety course which advises keeping a gun cocked, before you are ready to fire it? I doubt it.
But gosh, if you never know when you will have to out-draw somebody, you want that thing cocked, safety off and ready to go.
Keeping the gun cocks is also a good method of birth control. An infant may not be able to cock a gun, but even tiny, weak fingers can brush the trigger and set it off. No more child-support problems!
8No one will ever convince me that a person who leaves a loaded, cocked pistol within reach of toddlers or children (and how many times has that happened? Almost daily?) didn’t want to get rid of the kid.
9I truly cannot understand how a person who owns and carries a gun would go around with it loaded. Truly. I know if I did that I’d shoot myself. But then we don’t have any guns. We’re allergic to bullets.
10I know she must have been shocked and horrified at what she had done to herself but I also hope that the crowd around her at that contest also felt the same way and maybe suspended the competition if not completely calling it off like civilized people would do.
11I agree with maryelle– “accidental” shooting is a euphemism for “careless and stupid,” and I think it should warrant taking away someone’s permit to own a gun, or at least carry one in public.
People have their driving privileges revoked if they do something stupid with their car. But we’re supposed to put up with this deadly crap from stupid gun owners?
12Surprise, Surprise the VCGHC is a 100% NRA affiliate facility offering the NRA’s world famous fire arms safety course. Don’t we all feel secure?
13Marge, I own guns and have walked (and ridden the tractor) around our place carrying one (in a holster; I am not stupid.) Sometimes they’re loaded and sometimes they’re loaded (repeating: I am not stupid. All firearms are always loaded, even when I’ve pulled the magazine, checked the chamber, and am cleaning the piece.) I don’t know how many times I’ve walked or driven around with one loaded and I’ve never yet had an accidental discharge. And the reason for that are the stringent lessons in gun safety I had as a child, older child, young adult, and adult, mostly from my mother but also from other skillful and responsible gun owners and instructors.
These “accidental” discharges are not accidents but violations of basic gun safety rules which actually do work if you follow them. Can I say I’ll never be careless? No. Nobody can say that. But I can say that if I go on as I have so far…I will never put a bullet into anything I didn’t plan to shoot.
I feel that anyone who has an “accidental” discharge should have their license revoked and their firearm impounded until they have taken a longer, more serious, firearm safety course–if no property or person damage resulted. If it did, then they should lose their carry license for a year or more, depending on the amount of damage. Kill someone “accidentally” and it’s involuntary manslaughter with a mandatory prison sentence. (Alas, people who “do something stupid with their car” don’t lose their license permanently…)
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