Who's had a 'negligent discharge'??

I've only had one. While at a shooting range the NAA mini revolver I had locked up on me.
While playing with it it went off. It was pointing down range at the time so it wasn't that big of a deal, but it was still scary

I had one trying to drop the hammer and flip the safety on a rossi single. It was pointed in a safe direction. been close to a few others. always keep pointed in a safe direction.

Texas10mm said:

It sounds well and good but it's a lie.

With the number of gun owners in this country it would be impossible for that statement to be true.

I've been shooting almost 50 years. I haven't had one yet.

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You can say that and I respect it.

But you're not done yet.

First time shooting a new-to-me 1903 Colt. Racked the slide and had a slam-fire of 6 rounds like a machine gun. Was at an indoor range and all the rounds went downrange, but hit the floor about 7 or 8 feet in front of the bench.

So the original question was, "Who's had an ND?" yet a few chip in to claim they've never experienced one (that they can remember). I won't challenge anyone who says they've never had one. Possible, I suppose.

I submit that the more someone uses firearms, the longer one is around firearms, and especially if firearms are part of their job, the more likely one is to have one. I've seen numerous highly experienced personnel, both in the military and law enforcement, suffer that "Oh, ****!" moment while their ears are ringing. I personally witnessed an ND in an armory, seen numerous clearing barrels shot in Iraq, station-houses, jail salle ports, a parking lot, and the worst one ever, a shotgun in a patrol car while a rookie officer was locking it in the dash-mounted rack (uh, dude, not "cruiser-ready"). Too numerous too mention on the training range (usually down-range, but once overhead into a corrugated tin roof with an 870).

Typically, fatigue and/or complacency --- and this is so common to the occupations of those who use firearms as a living ---, sometimes inexperience, violation of Rule 1 and Rule 3, often alcohol-involved, sometimes just the weird, atypical brain-fart.

All I can say is that it happens. Probably a lot more often that even a lot of folks here suspect.

Mine was emptying a lever action.
Thank God I learned not to point a gun at things I don't want to destroy.
Primary reason I don't cry about Rossi, Winchester, and Marlin going to more than just a half cock safety.

I've had one. Shot the floor at a shooting range showing someone "What Not To Do". Glad it was facing down range. Scared the crap out of me. I almost shot my fridge once. Got done cleaning and putting my Glock back together. With out thinking I slapped a mag in it and pointed it my fridge to do a function check I noticed the weight. Yikes it was a full mag and put one in the chamber!! I called myself a series very bad names, unloaded the gun and set it down. Scared the crap out of me.

I think a thread such as this is valuable because it shows that even very experienced shooters sometimes screw up, which should make all of us even more careful that it doesn't happen to us.

I'm so focused on the rules of safe firearms use at the range that I sometimes forget something else. I have a habit of pushing my ear muffs up off my ears while changing targets and all too often I forget to push them back down before resuming shooting. I'm usually by myself so there's no one to remind me. I can personally attest to the fact that 9mm, .45, and .223 rounds are all quite loud, especially when you are in a pavilion that's closed on three sides.

I know that a lot of shooters use dry fire exercises as a practice activity but I just can't bring myself to pull the trigger on any of my guns while at home. Unless the time would come when I was doing it for real to protect myself.

I witnessed one at a LGS here in Albuquerque. The owner was in the back room with a shotgun that went off, blowing a hole high on the dividing wall. Lucky none of us were injured or worse. Needless to say, I've never been back.

I've probably had hundreds with lightweight triggers on rifles. Have had several dropping hammers on single action revolvers. It's really not a big deal at all if you follow the rules.

I've had three that I can recall. The circumstances? I don't remember. Really, I was just careless.

When I took the required NRA course for my pistol permit both the instructors said they'd had an AD/ND. Both when cleaning a semi auto and leaving one chambered after dropping the mag. Both were interrupted/distracted. It left the desired impression on me whether it was true or not. Hopefully the care that my job required transporting, loading and detonating high explosives over 26 years will have some carry over value to firearms.

If the weapon malfunctions and causes an unintentional discharge, that's an accidental discharge.

Any other unintentional discharge should have been prevented by the shooter, and is a negligent discharge.

That's what I believe, that's what I teach.

The word isn't being overused because it's being applied inappropriately, it's being overused because too many people are having negligent discharges.

When you pick up a weapon, you're responsible for the bullet. (Unless the weapon malfunctions.)

If you can't meet that responsibility, or, worse, don't believe it exists, don't pick up a weapon.

One for me - UD when I was a teen. I had a Remington Sportsman 58 shotgun. My brother and I had been hunting and we walked several areas. We unloaded our shotguns when we drove to a new spot. Last spot I dropped a shell into the chamber and touched the bolt release. The shotgun discharged into the ground about 3' behind my brother's feet. Both of us were understandably concerned but neither was injured.

The firing pin spring had broken and jammed the firing pin forward. It would slam fire a good percentage of the time. We tried it several times when we were trying to figure out what was going on.

I had always been taught to keep guns pointed in a safe direction. Good thing too, otherwise I could have easily shot my brother that day.

Jammersix said:

When you pick up a weapon, you're responsible for the bullet. (Unless the weapon malfunctions.)

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Your parenthetical caveat is wrong, and that’s part of the problem with the false accident/negligent dichotomy. About the only time you aren’t responsible is if someone has a gun to your head.

I’ll give you an example of a negligent discharge. You buy a used gun from someone. You don’t strip and clean it, you don’t take it to a gunsmith for a function check, you just load up a magazine, point it at the floor of your apartment, and chamber a round. The gun fires (maybe a gummed up firing pin), perhaps rips through the whole magazine, and the bullets travel through the floor and strike your downstairs neighbor. It’s negligent because that sort of mechanical failure is common, widely known, and you didn’t do any of the standard things (cleaning, function checking, consulting an expert, pointing the weapon in a safe direction, et cetera) that, taken together, make up reasonable care in preventing harm to others.

I’ll give you an example of a non-negligent discharge: you are in your shop function checking a pistol into a spiral trap. Your phone starts ringing loudly, starting you, and you are so surprised you accidentally send a bullet into your trap when you didn’t mean to. The discharge was an accident (unintentional, caused by human error), there was no mechanical failure, but you were using a trap designed to capture bullets and nobody was ever at risk. Because you exercised due care to prevent harm to others it wasn’t negligent.

Sounds to me like you're trying to use some kind of legality or responsibility based on results.

Legality should never be used as a substitute for morality, and the results don't have anything to do with whether or not a discharge caused by human error was negligent.

It makes your post sound to me like a complex attempt at making yet-another-excuse.

I stand by my teaching.

(So far, the test at the end of my classes only includes the safety rules. I think I'll add a question about what a negligent discharge is.)

Carry on.

Me two. One was when the extractor hook on my 1911 broke off and I didn't realize it since the gun functioned normally all day as I prowled around the Grasslands popping at various targets of opportunity. Got back to my camper, dropped the mag, racked the slide a couple of times in the appropriate manner and no round popped out. Odd. Well, figured it wa s a mis-feed, pointed it at a fencepost and pulled the trigger.

I can attest to the fact that the two worst sounds are a bang when you don't expect it, and a click when you expect a bang. Ever since, I've been a real prick about checking the chamber and mag well both visually and manually.

Second was at a Handgun Metallic Silhouette match. New Model 19 and I wasn't quiiiite used to the trigger. Gun went off (meaning I stupidly made it go off) as I was raising it to the targets.

Bullet ricocheted off the ground and hit the turkey, apparently right on an edge, since the bird slowly turned gracefully around like a number seven bowling pin and finally succumbed to the shot.

I turned around and asked my scorer,"Did that count?"

He answered, "It fell down when you went bang, so yes," and he marked it down as a hit.

Terry, 230RN

Jammersix said:

Sounds to me like you're trying to use some kind of legality or responsibility based on results.

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That’s one of the things you invite when using a legally-loaded word like “negligent”. It is one of a small handful of English language words that actually has a legal definition.

Legality should never be used as a substitute for morality, and the results don't have anything to do with whether or not a discharge caused by human error was negligent.

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This isn’t a moral issue.

It makes your post sound to me like a complex attempt at making yet-another-excuse.

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Excuse for what? I have never personally had an unintended discharge of any kind. I have nothing to make an excuse for.

It sounds like you are trying to make excuses for our difference of opinion.

I stand by my teaching.

(So far, the test at the end of my classes only includes the safety rules. I think I'll add a question about what a negligent discharge is.)

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Just remember that you are using a word with a specific legal meaning, in a way that is contrary to that meaning. If you aren’t extremely careful you may end up leaving your students with a misunderstanding of a concept that can leave them on the wrong end of a civil judgment. You are of course free to do what you like, but not running that particular test question by a lawyer would be negligent.

FFGColorado said:

Waiting till somebody posted..I had one, tow Sundays ago..I am a fairly new 'returnee' to guns after a 25 year or so hiatus..Spent some time(20 years) in the military(USN aviation) and altho not in ground combat arms, I knew 'some' about rifles and handguns.

Uberti/Beretta Bird's Head/Thunderer in 38..up in mountains with 2 son's.

Reloading the revolver..pointed at ground, hammer back 1/2, gate open, reloading. Once full, gate closed and instead of just pulling the hammer back full, this time I pulled hammer all the way back, then squeezed the trigger to then 'carefully' let the hammer go forward, then cock it..Pointed at the ground, thumb came off hammer and bang..into the ground..but really dumb..

Next time, after loading it, either leave the hammer 1/2 or just cock it , THEN point it, THEN squeeze the trigger..

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I had a similar situation, years back, lowering the hammer on a 1911 with a round chambered.

Normally I kept my off hand thumb over the firing pin to "catch" a slip, but somehow I managed to both slip the hammer fromy thumb and move my other thumb off the pin, still not sure how I managed.

Luckily other rules were followed so only my floor and pride suffered.

Now I don't decock manually at all, as a rule. Sure very occasionally I have to decock my Vaquero, but I take extra, extra, care and strive to never pull the hammer back without firing to reduce the chances further.

As a range officer, I have been around a number of both negligent and accidental discharges. A negligent discharge is caused when a human mishandles a firearm. An accidental discharge happens when a firearm has a mechanical problem that causes it to misfire at an inappropriate time.

I was standing and watching a student prepare to shoot a shotgun one time. When he loaded an Ithaca Model 10 Deerslayer for use, his finger was nowhere near the trigger, but the firearm went off and discharged its projectile in a safe direction. Turns out, because of a sticky or dirty trigger disconnect, and sometimes high primers on shotgun shells, the Ithaca Model 10 shotguns will go boom as soon as you slam the bolt home on them. That trigger disconnect was designed to be used to fast fire shotgun shells in a series of shots for very close combat needs like in a WW1 trench. There are rare occasions when the disconnect get stuck on and will fire a shell as soon as the bolt gets slammed forward. This is a mechanical problem that is prevalent with shotgun shells that happen to have high primers on them. A high primer is a primer that is not properly seat and extends back away from the rear end of the shotgun shell. So when conditions are just right, you get a mechanical failure and an accidental discharge.

WW2 Nambu pistols are also notorious for discharging if you apply pressure to the sides of them as well.

There are some firearm designed features that don't always work well as they were hoped to do. The WW1 Chaucat machinegun is another example of a failed or disliked weapons system because it didn't work right or was unsafe.

A couple of the discharges, I tend think, happened because the operator was trying to transition to a different system of some sort. Sort of like going from a double action pistol to a single action 1911 pistol. We had one officer who was switching to a 1911 pistol in .380 caliber for undercover work. He goofed up and shot one off in a direction that meant that nobody got hurt because he was following the safety rules. I don't know how many lives those safety rules have saved but they've earned their stripes many times over.

@Ed Ames, I like how you concluded your post above.

Ed Ames said:

Because you exercised due care to prevent harm to others it wasn’t negligent.

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Running with this idea, would you characterize my example in post #28 as accidental or negligent? Even though it was a stupid lapse, I intentionally aimed at a waterbed with the expectation that it would stop a 9mm round. Mattress was destroyed, but other than that, no damage but my ego. Definitely unintended discharge; accidental or negligent? I understand negligent as failing to take proper care. I was both careless (didn't clear the chamber) and careful (employed rule #4).

ETA: The more I think about this, it seems that "accidental" and "negligent" are not separate categories. Accidental seems like a broad category, that would include any unintentional discharge, whether caused by mishandling, mechanical failure, being startled, etc. Negligent seems like a subset of accidental in which one fails to take proper care. Thus, I can see a jury contemplating "Yes, it was accidental; but was it negligent?"

Safe to say that the four rules provide redundant care such that even when one is violated, negligence is mitigated?

Legionnaire said:

@Ed Ames, I like how you concluded your post above.

Running with this idea, would you characterize my example in post #28 as accidental or negligent? Even though it was a stupid lapse, I intentionally aimed at a waterbed with the expectation that it would stop a 9mm round. Mattress was destroyed, but other than that, no damage but my ego. Definitely unintended discharge; accidental or negligent? I understand negligent as failing to take proper care. I was both careless (didn't clear the chamber) and careful (employed rule #4).

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My own private rule of thumb is, “It can’t be an accident if you do something that you really shouldn’t have been doing.”

What I mean:

If a person was doing something like unloading a gun before cleaning, with the intention of being safe, that’s reasonable. Everyone who owns a gun does that. If for whatever reason they put a round into an expensive but reasonable waterbed mattress backstop, it doesn’t really matter to me whether the reason for the discharge was a muscle twitch, a mental lapse, or a mechanical failure...the person had what in English is called an accident. Their goal was reasonable, their intent was safety, but the results didn’t align with the intent.

On the other hand, if a person doesn’t have safety in mind when they are handling a firearm, to me that’s negligent (in the non-legal sense) even if there isn’t a discharge. If the behavior is already negligent and the gun goes off to me that would be a negligent discharge. For example if a guy, in the midst of a party, decides to show off their new gun, and drags a bunch of The Guys into the bedroom for a little privacy, and, rather than clearing it, locking the action open, or anything like that, he puts a round into the water bed mattress in an attempt to assure everyone it isn’t loaded...to me that’s negligent. The person in this second scenario wasn’t even trying to exercise due care.

Same immediate cause (pulling the trigger on a loaded gun), same outcome (waterbed with a big leak), but in one case I’d call it an accident and in the other I would call it negligent.

Thanks. We think along the same lines.

If you squeeze a trigger when you didn't intend to fire, that is a negligent discharge. Where the bullet goes has nothing to do with it. Negligence can be prevented and accidents cannot within reason. If you are startled and accidentally pull the trigger, that is negligence because your finger was on the trigger when you didn't intend to fire.

Bill Jordan had a pretty bad negligent discharge. If it can happen to him...

It happened to my Captain in the Dallas DPS office in 1983, too. Captain Robert Jones was killed when one of his patrolmen was demonstrating some fast and fancy revolver handling he had seen at in-service. He thought his M28 was unloaded. It wasn't.

The links to Jordan's tragedy:
https://www.cbp.gov/about/in-memoriam/john-rector
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/15377355/jordan-and-rector-pp1/