I wrote earlier about safety and firearms, specifically whether a gun is loaded or not loaded determines whether it can be fired. If it’s empty, it’s a club. Yet I keep hearing about instances where a loaded gun will “discharge” and injure someone. Unless a gun is broken or one of a few old models that will go off if dropped, a firearm will not and cannot discharge of its own volition. It is an “it” and can’t self-actuate.

Also, a gun can’t accidentally go off, either. An accident is when you don’t intend for something to happen but it happens anyway. If you are driving down a country road (or anywhere, for that matter) and a deer runs out in front of you, it’s likely you will use your brakes and attempt to steer away from the deer. You can manage to avoid the deer and still slide off the road into a tree. That was an unintended consequence of your avoidance maneuvering. You did not drive toward the tree. Thus, running into the tree was accidental.

Guns aren’t like that. You can’t wave the gun at someone and it then “accidentally” fires. The motion of moving the gun won’t cause it to go bang. Something else must always be done. Every time. That something is pulling the trigger. A gun fires because a person pulled the trigger. They might not have meant to do that (which opens up the question – if they didn’t mean to pull the trigger, why did they have their finger on the trigger in the first place?), but they pulled the trigger, the gun fired and the person would have just caused a negligent discharge. Not accidental, negligent.

If you put your finger on the trigger when you don’t intend to shoot, you have created a threat to yourself and others. Blowing big holes in your extremities isn’t pleasant. Neither is running bullets into bystanders or furnishings. Yet this threat is so easy to overcome – just don’t get your finger on the trigger. Do not rely on safeties or other excuses for poor gun-handling. Many handguns of modern design don’t even have any external safety levers or buttons. It’s all the trigger. It is a bit late to learn this after you are bleeding all over the carpeting. Keep your finger off the trigger and keep all your body parts unventilated, regardless of what you are doing with your gun. Then when you need to shoot, you’ll have the gun pointed at a real threat when you put your finger on the trigger. All you have to do then is pull the trigger a lot of times and the real threat goes away.