A man came up to me the other day, big man, yuuuuuge muscles; and he said- tears in his eyes- “Sir! Sir, please tell us about all the dangerous stuff you’ve seen at a shooting range!”

…Well, no; not really . Not even Trump could make that line work.

But you’re gonna hear ’em anyway, because I’m a clout chasing bitch. Posts titled “Tales from the range” will be, mainly, about the kinds of people you encounter as a shooter and an instructor at a shooting range and other places. They don’t inspire a lot of confidence, honestly. Yeah, I know; “not all”. I know there a LOT of people who treat shooting a gun as the serious business it is, and who place safety paramount. But there’s plenty of others who have no business being anywhere NEAR a gun.

These are their stories *DUN-DUN!*

And since the term “accidental discharge” got used in yet another news article, this time involving Atlanta Hartsfield Airport, the first Tales will be about that very topic.

One that’s rather personal to me because it involved my leg comes to mind immediately. We’re back in around 2006 or so. The agency I’m with carries Glock 23 .40S&W as the standard sidearm, and I’m the departmental armorer and rangemaster. Officers would often ask me to work on their personal weapons, or ask for approved modifications to their duty weapon (extended mag releases, sights, that sort of thing.) I’m in the CID (investigations) Captain’s office with the Captain and our crime scene Sergeant. His office is in the basement of the county jail, with carpet over a concrete floor. He’s sitting behind his desk; an enormous hunk of ’50s wooden office furniture whose sides reach to the floor. The crime scene Sgt. is seated to my left on the other side of the desk from the Captain; I’m on the right. The Captain is also on the SWAT team with me, and was wanting to talk to me abut something to do with that (I don’t remember exactly what); the Sgt. was here because he wanted me to replace the sights on his gun because he thought they were too dim (all of our duty weapons came with Trijicon low-light fixed sights). Tritium sights DO lose brightness over time; so it was a fair request. He unholstered his pistol and, while keeping it pointed at the floor, removed the magazine and locked the slide to the rear, ejecting the round in the chamber. He put the mag and loose round on the desk and handed me the pistol with the slide back. I took it from him, checked it empty, and looked at the sights; keeping it pointed at the floor.

His sights WERE pretty dark; the weapon was probably 7, 8 years old. We talked about whether or not he wanted standard replacements or did he want to buy some on his own and have me install them, and the pros and cons of different types, and then I handed it back to him. He reloaded and reholstered it, and the Captain and I talked.

While we were talking, the Sgt. decided he wanted to look at his sights again. He unholstered and pointed at the floor in front of the desk, sighting down the top. The Captain and I, intent on our conversations, didn’t notice.

And then he figured he’d dry-fire it.

“Dry-firing” is pulling the trigger on an empty weapon; or one loaded with dummy rounds. Since “every gun is ALWAYS loaded” is a fundamental rule; when you are doing deliberate “dry fire” (very important for developing trigger discipline), you imagine there’s a powerful laser coming out of the end of the gun and don’t point it at anything you don’t want to destroy… Rule 2; so if it IS loaded, at least you didn’t shoot another person.

Do you see the problem here? He reloaded and reholstered the gun… and then pulled it out again. He never unloaded it.

Now, this isn’t an idiot. The Sgt. was a pretty intelligent guy, and had never been a safety issue on the range. He knew the rules of gun safety and followed them. But he let himself get distracted between putting the gun away, and later deciding he wanted to look at the sights again. So when he pulled the trigger on a gun his brain told him was unloaded…

My first immediate thought after the gun went off was “God DAMN that was loud!” The Captain was doing his best impression of Sylvester the Cat flying up to the ceiling and hanging by his claws. The Sgt. was frozen, gun still pointed at the floor. I distinctly remember the smell of smokeless powder.

That’s when I realized I had felt something hit my pants leg. I looked down with some trepidation.

The round had shattered on the concrete under the carpet and sprayed the desk and my leg with fragments. There was a tiny scratch where one fragment had made it through the fabric of my pants leg and a scar on the desk; but no further damage.

At least the root-cause analysis on this one was pretty cut and dried.

Fast-forward another 5 years or so and I’m at another agency, also departmental armorer and rangemaster and the ONLY instructor (and a zillion other hats I got to wear), taking the Sheriff himself out for annual qualification. Firearms qualification for the heads of agencies is always a little fraught, if that head doesn’t like shooting very much. In this case, the Sheriff knew he wasn’t a good shot, and was very nervous about qualification. In these cases, it is good to be the king; so the Sheriff got a range session all to himself. If he’s afraid of showing his troops he’s a bad shot because there’s an audience, he’s not going to do well. And even without an audience, he was nervous. Visibly nervous, and I was doing my best to be soothing and reassuring.

The Georgia Double-Action Course has stages at 25, 15, 10, and 7 yards. At the 15, you start at the “low ready”- weapon pointed in front of your feet- and on the whistle, you raise it to the firing level and engage the targets. The Sheriff was on the 15, weapon at the ready, when I realized I didn’t have my stopwatch; so I told him to hold steady while I went to the bench and retrieved it. I turned back from the benches in time to see him fire one round off into the dirt in front of his feet.

“Cease fire!” got yelled by reflex, and he turned towards me with a surprised look on his face. He did, at least, keep the weapon pointed downrange. “Let’s just go ahead and re-holster and take a break for a minute” I said; because at this point both of us needed to calm down.

This is why all the safety rules work together; but especially #3… “Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to pull the trigger”. In talking about it back at the benches, he admitted he was running through the motions of firing in his head, because he was so nervous about doing poorly… and pantomimed pulling the trigger as well. Because he had it pointed in a safe direction, once again no one got hurt. But we all got a reminder of how dangerous a gun can be.

Now, I’ve gotten flack for saying “There are no such thing as accidental discharges” from people who insist there’s always a chance that a gun could go off without someone pulling the trigger. OK. Sure. If you want to take in ALL possibilities; there is a set of circumstances out there where such a thing can happen; such as an unattended, loaded gun gets struck by lightning and the round in the barrel cooks off and hits someone.

But it’s not real damn likely to happen. In almost every case, there is some human negligence that led to this event. The closest I’ve found to a truly, bizarrely “accidental” discharge was because of …a piece of corn cob.

At my first agency, around 1998 or so, the standard duty firearm was a Smith and Wesson 4006 in .40S&W (say that 5 times fast). Once again, I’m armorer and rangemaster; and we’re doing annual qualification. During this qualification, we had two different people, on different days, on the firing line when their pistol fired full-auto.

Needless to say, this is not normal behavior from a 4006. The only way to make it full-auto is to do some grinding and polishing on the sear- the piece that releases the hammer when the trigger is pulled. Since I had another armorer with me on these occasions, we detail stripped the guns involved and examined them. We couldn’t find any defects with the gun; but we did find tiny grains of a light tan material in the action of the gun. Something about the material registered on my brain; it looked very much like the ground corn cob material used to polish brass cases before reloading ammunition.

We had just recently switched the ammo we used for target practice and qualifications. It was manufactured by a local Georgia ammunition manufacturer who was known for relatively good quality at a low price- and price is always a consideration for police departments; at least the ones I worked for. “Cheap is good, and free is better!” was the motto.The bullet was a hollowpoint; not needed for practice ammo; but at these prices, who cared! They had recently changed the design of their hollowpoint; the cavity in the bullet was longer and narrower. A negligible change that had no effect on the accuracy of the rounds.

But this new cavity showed a tendency to capture the grains of ground up corn cob that were used to polish the bullets before packaging. When we looked at the box of ammo he loaded the gun with, we found polishing media in the hollowpoint cavities. When the gun fired, the media shook out of the cavity of the rounds in the magazine and made it’s way into the workings of the gun. Some of these grains lodged themselves under the sear and held it back when the trigger was pulled… resulting in the pistol firing again after the slide cycled; for as long as the trigger was held back.

That’s the closest truly “God did it!” “accidental” discharge I’ve ever run across in my life. And even that was the result of someone else’s negligence- in this case, the ammo manufacturer.

So, still I insist:

There is NO such thing as an accidental discharge.

More to come.