"Don’t Call It a “Negligent” Discharge"?

How about we don't excuse bad training.

This is an article from Police Magazine. I actually understand the main premise, but they went and soiled the sack at the end.

Before we play judge, jury, and executioner by hanging the millstone of “negligent discharge” around someone’s neck, we owe it to ourselves and the firearms community at large to not be cavalier in our use of language by perpetuating the use of irresponsible terms that carry with them serious legal ramifications.

OK, I can see the benefit. District Attorneys and ambulance chasers love to use and twist language into favorable verdicts to them.

So, what exactly is a negligent discharge? Here’s the gist of what you’re likely to hear from people of varying backgrounds; “If your gun fired when you didn’t want it to and you had your finger on the trigger, then you were negligent.”

Well, yes. That is what happens in most cases.

Are there instances where firearms can be discharged in a negligent manner? Absolutely. However, determinations of this type are best left to the legal confines of a courtroom, not by instructors on a gun range, or some police managers who, without thinking things through, mis-label an event in quick attempt to place blame.

Hold the fort there Johnny. Are you suggesting that we should allow some legal-type individual without a good firearms background (including practical training) to determine what is negligent or not? Oh yeah, I forgot: this is an article from the viewpoint of a LEO. There is that one rule we all know: “Never trust what a cop says when it comes to guns.”

The article goes on to mention three types of firearms discharges:

1. The accidental discharge occurs when a firearm discharges absent human interaction with the trigger. Examples would be older firearms that aren’t drop safe, or situations where a foreign object gets pushed into the trigger guard resulting in activation of the trigger mechanism.

2. The intentional discharge is defined as intentionally doing everything needed to fire the gun. Examples would be range practice or real-world situations where a person used their gun in self defense and made a conscious decision to shoot.

3. The unintentional discharge of which there are two types. The unintentional voluntary is defined as doing everything needed to make the gun go off simply believing it to be unloaded. Examples of this would be dry-fire practice and or gun cleaning where, after the cleaning or dry practice session, the gun is loaded followed by a distraction and/or interruption whereupon the operator comes back to the gun, picks it up and takes one more practice trigger press believing it to still be unloaded. And the unintentional involuntary, which is caused by three primary means with the common variable of improper trigger finger placement:

And I can see the nomenclature working in a legal environment; rather than calling it negligent with immediately implies gross indifference to human life and automatic guilty consideration, we pause to make distinctions and try to seek truth and solutions. But it is the last line that gives me a twitching eye. And this paragraph does not help much either:

In the police world, if an officer fails to properly clear their pistol while pointing into a bullet trap and fires a live round or unintentionally fires a round while their firearm is pointed downrange, they aren’t accused of negligence. For starters, it’s hard to accuse someone of negligence when the firearm was either pointed downrange or into a device designed to safely capture the projectile. In the bullet trap scenario, our former agencies would issue minor discipline for failing to follow proper safety protocols and it would be written up as an unintentional discharge.

If you don’t want to call it negligent because of legal/management considerations, that is somewhat fine. But it was a considerable fuck up to have a gun go off because you activated the trigger. That the bullet ended its travel in a safe backstop does not relieve the shooter of all responsibility.

Let me go back to a section of the article:

And the unintentional involuntary, which is caused by three primary means with the common variable of improper trigger finger placement:

* Startle response is when the operator’s finger is on the trigger or in very close proximity followed by an external stimulus, usually a loud noise causing an involuntary clench of the firing hand which can result in an unintended press of the trigger.

* Sympathetic response—also referred to as a contralateral contraction and/or activation—occurs when the operator’s finger is on the trigger or in very close proximity followed by utilizing the support hand to grab, move, push, or pull something which results in contraction and/or involuntary sympathetic squeeze of the primary hand, which in turn can result in an unintentional discharge. This also occurs with jumping and kicking movements.

* Balance disruption occurs when the operator’s finger is on the trigger or in very close proximity followed by any form of balance disruption such as a forward or backward stumble or having another person or object fall into you unexpectedly. Resultant balance disruption can trigger an involuntary clenching of the primary hand resulting in an unintentional discharge.

The commonality of these legal excuses is the same: The finger was not where it was supposed to be. Maybe if there was a fixed and proved guidance to help us avoid this issue or reduce it to an almost statistical zero…

Imagine that! There is a set guidance that has been keeping shooters safe for decades now.

It does not matter if you are standing in front of a P.A. array at a concert venue and the drummer suddenly hits the kickdrum. It is irrelevant if you are grabbing a falling item or if you trip over a family cat: If your finger is nowhere near the trigger guard, you weapon will not go off.

And again, if you want to call it Unintentional Discharge for the sake of litigation or lack thereof, fine. But if you try to rewrite firearms safety because you are not properly training your officers and believe they should be given breaks when they fuck up, you are simply on the wrong side of the gun safety issue.

And if you do not believe me, ask the tens of thousands of civilians engaged in shooting activities every weekend, burning more ammo on a range session than 10 officers do in a year (qualifier included) and all go back home with the same number of holes and the same volume of blood inside the body.

Thanks to Tom Walls for forwarding the article.