Negligent: failing
to take proper care in doing something.
We in shooting talk about Negligent Discharge (ND) when a gun is fired
without intent. Accidental Discharge
(AD) used to be another common term that has fallen out of favor as safety has
been built in to modern firearms making the AD nearly obsolete.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as a
friend recently shared an experience of teaching a non-firearms related class
where a student ignored the safety precautions and slightly injured
herself. This was a situation that could
have been much more serious outside of a controlled environment and my friend
felt very bad for not preventing it. I
had to ask, can we really stop someone from doing something dumb or can we only
provide the tools and knowledge to do it right?
NDs come in many forms.
Have you ever sliced toward yourself, instead of away, and yep…here
comes the blood. Did you know
better? Sure, but it always worked
before. I once dropped a freshly cleaned
rifle on my foot while putting it away.
It slipped. Did I know that I
should always wear shoes while handling weighty or pointy objects? Yes.
Did I that day? No. I ended up with a 2+ inch gash on the top of
my foot and a toe with three shattered, not just broken, bones, lost the flexor
tendon in the process. Luckily I have a
toe that is essentially one long fused piece, slightly longer than it used to
be, that doesn’t bend. Given the damage
it could have been a lot worse. And, I
got a great safety story out of it.
Many years ago I took flying lessons. If you have never been up in a small plane,
it is completely different that the commercial planes and is SO MUCH FUN! My instructor, Bernie, was a sweet older man
who just loved to fly. He had been at it
for more than 40 years, and his career included time as a Navy Test Pilot, and
more than 20 years teaching. The club I
belonged to held monthly safety meetings.
One night our speaker was Bernie.
He explained there were two types of pilots. Those that have pulled the
mixture and those that would. If you don’t
know, pulling the mixture on a small single engine plan kills the engine. He had reached for the throttle, to slow the
engine, while up with a student and instead pulled the mixture. (Luckily I was not the student.) The second part of his lecture involved
explaining the challenge and failure to air-start a Cessna 152 below 2000 feet
and the difficult but successful dead stick landing. No injury, no damage.
Sometimes it is carelessness, sometimes it is
distraction. But it is avoidable. We know the safety rules. We know what we should do. We know bad things happen. Was it the instructors fault? No!
Was it my fault breaking my toe?
Yes! Was it Bernie’s fault for
puling the wrong knob? Yes! What is the common denominator? Negligence.
Don’t fool yourself into skipping a safety rule “just
this once”. It only take one round
missed when cleaning a gun to shoot yourself or someone else. There are so many things that can go
wrong. Be smart, not a cautionary
tale. If you’ve done some of these
things and are not scarred, you are lucky.
Be smart and don’t try it again.
You never know when the next time may be the last time. You won’t always have an instructor close to
jump in and rescue you.
Only you can prevent a ND.
