Only Military and Police should have guns

[HorseSoldier]

I really don't like the term AD. Can anyone point to a single incident where a weapon went off accidentaly without human error? I.E. ND vs. AD? Not a range malfunction but an honest to god "It just went off, I never touched it." If a gun goes of without you wanting it to then 99.999% of the time it means you screwd up, barring freak mechanical failure of a well maintained weapon.

AD vs ND is just semantics. In the mid-2000s when I was shooting and training a lot of combat marksmanship skills, AD was the most commonly used term from what I recall. It seems like there was a backlash as stated against the "accidental" wording, though I think some of it may have been also related to the Big Army reinventing the wheel. As a support guy in an SF unit, they were ADs and whoever popped one off was not in a happy place after it happened with their team sergeant. (And in some SOF units, 1 AD = finding a new home; a buddy of mine had his squad leader in one of the ranger batts booted to the 82nd for an AD during a training iteration with blanks.)

On return to Big Army (or National Guard facsimile thereof) from that gig, however, suddenly they're NDs instead. "Negligent" sounds much more indicting, though (at least in the last unit I went downrange with) their consequences were much less severe. (Which is, at least, fair to the troops, since in that unit the ND's started with substandard leaders failing to train their subordinates and ended with guys cranking rounds off with a frequency I found shocking. It's pretty bad when you are in a unit where you can discuss AD/ND incidents and conclude "at least only one guy got shot.")

 

[RetiredUSNChief]

The points about AD are very valid.

A true "accident", of any kind, is extremely rare when you think about it. In fact, some law enforcement agencies have changed their views and terminology in the realm of vehicular accidents to "incidents". It's a shift in paradigms in the approach.

A firearm discharge has a cause. If that cause is related to human contact/handling/mishandling, then the root cause is not likely to be an "accident" in the true meaning of the word.

"Accident" implies "not my fault".

"Not my fault" means "nothing I did while handling, storing, repairing, or maintaining the firearm contributed to the discharge".

If the fault was due to another person, then the discharge may be deemed "accidental" with respect to the person who was handling it at the time. It still had a human factor, though.

A possible example might be a gunsmith improperly servicing a single action revolver for repairs, which caused a mechanical failure which released the hammer immediately after it was cocked, without the owner touching the touching the trigger.


I like the term "ND" much better, because understanding the difference between "accidental" and "negligent" is a matter of personal responsibility. It's a paradigm which says "I understand I am fully responsible for all my actions with respect to handling anyfirearm and I do not accept excuses for poor behavior and habits."

 

[9MMare]

Only the military and police should have guns.

*sigh*

Well that's just great!

I look lousy in uniforms.

 

[xfyrfiter]

I once worked for a company that did not have [accident] as a word in their safety vocabulary. The word was [incident] and the question was [avoidable? or unavoidable?] and believe me there were few unavoidable incidents. BTW this was a trucking company with millions of miles per year.