The Gun Culture is Somewhat In Denial About Gun Safety.

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In my life I've know more people killed by drunk drivers than guns.The incidents with guns usually involved alcohol.I have never known a person dying from an accidental discharge.Sure it happens,I just don't know anyone that died that way.

Pardon the repitition on this,older members know what I'm talking about.
Where I live it will takes the police thirty minutes to get here,if I'm lucky.There was a violent home invasion next door.And a rabies epidemic.So one should beat the home invader or rabid skunk with a stick?No thanks,I'll keep the gun.

There are no small kids around me,thank goodness.But if someone showed up with one I will get the gun of the coffee table and put it in a safe place.Its just common sense.

how does one post part of a quote? i ask here because folks on this thread are doing it. i tried highlighting the salient portion before i hit "quote". that didn't work. so, a little help, please?

What will that moderate policy get us in reality?


Borderline personal attack.


Our current laws are all over the map. Some states have draconian gun laws.

The "quote" button will automatically copy the whole message being quoted with the appropriate coding to make the quote appear in a quote box. The quote text itself can be edited as you desire by deleting (but, hopefully not adding) parts of the quoted message that are considered irrelevant.

Last edited by AspieUtah on 03 Jan 2015, 10:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's not at all uncommon to survive a gunshot wound. Suicides often pull the gun away at the moment the trigger is pulled and not do the intended damage. On the other hand, I think driving a vehicle into a retaining wall at 120 MPH would do the job much more reliably even if they hit the brakes in the last second before impact.

My concealed-firearm permit instructor mentioned in 2002 that individuals survive gunshot wounds about 80 percent of the time. This appears to have been accurate according to a New York Times news report http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyreg ... html?_r=2& which described how "...[i]f a gunshot victim’s heart is still beating upon arrival at a hospital, there is a 95 percent chance of survival, Dr. DiMaio said. (People shot in vital organs usually do not make it that far, he added.) [...] Shots to roughly 80 percent of targets on the body would not be fatal blows, Dr. Fackler said....

My instructor also said that law-enforcement officers are generally able to hit their intended targets just 20 percent of the time. No word on where the other 80 percent of their bullets end up. However, most citizen shooters are much better because they practice more than LEOs do. A friend of mine who was a commander with the Salt Lake City Police Department confirmed that fact when he said that he personally knew that almost all his officers fired exactly six bullets a year -- when they recertified at the range.

I have a lot of country relatives and have heard all kinds of stories about guns hurting kids. My cousin grew up with a shot gun in his hand and he blew off one of his hands as a teenager and had to be med evacuated to a hospital. It was an accident. The gun just went off when he was trying to go through a barbed wire fence. Guns can cause accidents. It doesn't really matter what else causes them, does it? Sure we can get hit in the head by a falling icicle but what does it really matter on this thread? On this thread, people get injured or killed in accidents involving guns, not anything else.

And to those engaging in personal attacks -
Please do not use demeaning words to each other on this thread. It's all I ask. You can talk to someone and agree to disagree without calling them words like dope and ret*d. You might disagree with what they say, that's fine, but at least respect them enough not to insult them only because they happen to have a different opinion.

Now be kind to one another.

Thank you.

The guns did it all on their own, eh? They just up and hurt those poor kids.


There are safe methods of safely negotiating a fence with a long gun that any hunter should always practice. Your cousin did not practice that and suffered the consequences. If anything it should serve as a sobering lesson for others on how not to negotiate a fence.


Unsafe handling of guns causes accidents. This is an NRA certified Range Safety Officer that you're trying to BS about firearms safety here. Most wold find that a bit odd.......


YOU knowingly created a climate for incivility by starting this thread.

Actually I really did start this thread in the hope I would be enlightened about what was going on with these two ladies. I was hoping someone knowledgeable of guns and gun safety or just gun culture could give me some insight about what was going through their minds. To me it's alarming this would happen.

I have been around gun people most of my life, so I know how they are and not once has any young child shot his own parents and no one ever talked about it even being a possibility throughout my entire childhood. There was a fear of kids harming themselves and each other, and that has been reported on the news in the past and people I know who are into guns, mostly family members, would talk about gun dangers to me mostly, not my cousins so much while I was visiting, although my uncle lectured us on guns whenever he was around and someone had a b b gun or something and my uncle is one of those who has been around guns his whole life and goes hunting and whatnot, and has a gun case in his living room and he takes gun safety extremely seriously, won't even allow hunters on his land even though they try to sneak on it in the Fall. This is one of the reasons it's so strange my cousin accidentally shot himself because it's not like my Uncle was lax about stuff like that. My cousin was with friends at the time, away from home.

Even though family members have rifles, they could have hand guns too, I don't know, they never talked about those, they are never out where anyone can pick them up and examine them. He is a complete fanatic about gun safety so it's very strange to me when people have their guns out. Even my friend who had a firearm never had it out, it was always in it's holster. In my family, this idea that people should be brazen and have guns out for any reason except to clean and to use for something, is strictly forbidden. So there would never be a gun sitting there on a coffee table, for instance, out in the open, with people walking around, kids or otherwise.

So you see, Raptor, simply talking about this doesn't mean it's an attack on anyone. It is simply a matter of probing the two events that occurred and wondering if it is connected with the culture that says we must be protected at all times so the gun has to be in the purse or on the coffee table, you know? My family is old skool about guns and gun ownership.

I am not saying that is for certain what happened in either of these incidents, that these women were brazen and kind of careless, I was just wondering what kind of thinking led up to them.

Modern firearms do not "just go off", you have to pull the trigger, and even then there might be a trigger blade safety or other mechanism in place that prevents discharge, such as a grip safety. There's a reason that in the gun community we no longer say 'accidental discharge', we say 'negligent discharge', because unless your gun is quite old and poorly maintained or has been modified in an unsafe manner, if it went off it means you pulled the trigger. You can drop a cocked S&W revolver straight down onto concrete and have it land on the hammer and it still won't go off, the rebound slide is under so much spring tension that is faster than the hammer and will block it before it can fall (gunsmith, remember, AFAIK the only one on WP), while modern automatics employ firing pin locking mechanisms that only release the firing pin as the trigger is pulled. Just think of the liability if a company released a firearm that occasionally fires on it's own, they'd be sued out of existence the first time it happened.

My cousin's gun discharged on him in the mid eighties so I don't know if that's considered modern, and my family said he didn't have the safety on and that's why it went off. They didn't go into elaborate detail, just the impression he was using the gun as a walking stick or cane while he walked and it went off when he went through the fence so maybe he accidentally squeezed the trigger or it brushed against a rock or the ground?

And of course I never pried into the event with a lot of questions because he never brought it up to anyone so I figured he didn't want to talk about the details.

Persimmonpudding seems to have wrong and prejudged generazations about gun owners. I don't know if they are basing this off a few they know or the general left leaning "they don't think like us so they wrong, lets call them names" theme. don't even feel like addressing each one would serve a point as they don't seem like they will stop or see why its wrong.

upsetting but something I've sadly seen a lot lately

The guns did it all on their own, eh? They just up and hurt those poor kids.

Guns don't kill people, 2 year-olds do?

The 2 year-old is mightier than the sword?

My aggravation is not directed at gun-owners in general. I have several, all inherited.

There are certain people on here saying crap that is directly contradictory to fact, though, and they are doing so with airs of arrogance. They are citing demagogues rather than believable sources.

Let us be clear: carrying a gun for "safety" is a stupid idea. It never has and never will actually make you safer. Acknowledge that you carry it for a psychological sense of empowerment, which happens to be important for some people.

This does't mean that I am calling for guns to be banned. It doesn't work. The Harvard study illustrated this.

What might work would be keeping them out of the hands of people who have a history of not being able to handle themselves responsibly, WHICH WE ALREADY DO. The methods currently in use are the best available, except possibly those used by Sweden, which actually has a fairly high rate of gun ownership per capita but is nevertheless a very safe country. They also exercise a sensible, balanced policy.

I don't have a problem with guns or people who own guns, but I cannot abide a man who lives a lie.

This reminds me of my own Utah Second Amendment community which, when it decides that a rally or protest event is warranted at our state Capitol Building, asks that individuals who attend it "dress conservatively" with "no open carried firearms" by being "good will ambassadors" to the greater community.

They argue that if we were to actually, really, show the world that we own, possess and use our firearms, the otherwise academic supporters among the majority of our state would recoil in abject fear of what we had become. I saw this diminution of will many years ago among the state's LGBT community which decided frequently that open, public, demonstrations of similar rallies or protests (never mind holding hands or the innocent kiss) would harm the little bit of equality that had been accomplished then.

In this case, it has been argued that owning, possessing and using a firearm is allowable by those who consider firearms "icky" but not by those who see it as a full exercise of the current constitutional interpretation of the Second Amendment. Like my examples, this is an academic opinion.

We already have state, federal and (in some jurisdictions) local laws which consider certain safety-related behaviors with firearms criminal while considering other safety-related behaviors a personal choice under the current interpretation of the right to keep (own) and bear (possess and carry) arms (any weapon that is in common use among law-enforcement officers and military service members).

The more that some laws restrict or avoid personal choice in this matter, the more that those laws are likely to violate the current interpretation and risk being determined unconstitutional.

I see our current laws as nearly correct; both in terms of keeping and bearing arms, but also in the safe use of them. My own ideas of how to improve the laws are for another day and topic.