A “responsible” gun owner accidentally shot his friend at a gun show in Phoenix, Arizona. The Arizona Department of Public Safety is investigating the incident, but the shooting wasn’t fatal. We do have to ask why this kind of thing keeps happening, though. One would think our growing gun culture would foster increased safety training, at a bare minimum, and instead, it’s having the exact opposite effect.
The man was looking at a semi-automatic weapon he’d recently purchased, but it’s not clear if he bought it at the show, or if he brought it into the show from outside. Nevertheless, signs at the show said that guns were not to be loaded. This is one of the key failures in gun safety that we refuse to address. Accidental shootings happen because people who call themselves responsible (but really aren’t) think the gun isn’t loaded right up until it goes off.
If they’re lucky, nothing worse than a hole in the wall happens. However, far too many result in injury—or death—to someone else, usually a family member. Sometimes, that family member is a child, which is very sad. One woman was braiding her 8-year old daughter’s hair when she dropped her gun, and it went off. As If You Only News writer Christian Drake asked, “Why the f*ck do you need a freakin’ gun to braid your daughter’s hair? Are there terrorists in it?”
Good question! Sadly, unlike the man at the Phoenix gun show, this little girl died from her injuries, all because her mother had a loaded gun out where she could drop it.
The list goes on, too. It’s entirely too frequent that we hear of an accidental shooting that wouldn’t have happened if the allegedly “responsible” gun owners had actually been responsible with their guns. It’s like they don’t even know what basic gun safety is. Why don’t we require gun owners to go through safety classes?
Some say that training is cost-prohibitive, and will also result in fewer gun owners. Others think that training will result in gun registries, which they fight vehemently against. In short, the reason we don’t have mandatory safety classes for gun ownership is because of the very same people who think it’s just peachy if everyone can own whatever guns they want.
The man from the gun show is expected to make a full recovery; the bullet didn’t hit any vital organs. But this just goes to show why gun safety is so important, and why we need to stop treating guns like toys and signs of manliness, and start treating them like the deadly weapons they are.
Featured image by PDPics. Licensed under Public Domain via Pixabay
