The week of March 26 wasn’t an extraordinarily busy one in GunFAIL terms. But it had an interesting mix of problems. Of course, there were all the usuals: 14 people who accidentally shot themselves, eight accidental gun fatalities, seven kids accidentally shot, five accidental shootings at or near the practice ranges (where “near” means someone missed their target & sent a stray into the neighborhood), four people who accidentally shot family members or significant others, and even two “defensive gun uses” that went wrong.
TSA agents at airports around the country discovered 71 guns “forgotten” in the carry-on luggage of passengers during the week of March 27-April 2. But TSA also made the news in Atlanta, where they were found to have missed one gun. The owner, finding it in her bag as she prepared to board at the gate, reported the gun to the authorities and was arrested. (Though she claimed to have a permit for the gun, issued in Alabama, she had neglected to take it with her. And then, I guess, promptly forgot she had the gun with her at all.) The Atlanta TSA screener who missed the gun was fired. No word on whether there was a TSA screener who initially missed the gun in Alabama, though. But I guess there was. We just don’t know who that was.
An unfortunate accidental gun death in Goetz, Wisconsin, gives us yet another opportunity to remind would-be cowboys that modern double-action handguns are not “safe” to spin on your finger. That trick you see in the movies is either just that—a movie trick—or is being performed with a single-action revolver. In other words, a gun that has to have the hammer cocked manually, and on which the trigger does nothing but release a cocked trigger. Guns like that shouldn’t fire when you spin them, no matter how hard you may hit the trigger, because the hammer isn’t cocked. That said, please don’t do this. There are a lot of people out there, and a lot of guns, and if enough of you do it, someone will screw it up and forget they’ve cocked the hammer, and accidentally shoot themselves while twirling a single-action revolver, and then we’ll have been wrong about something in a gun debate and will be forced under the Second Amendment to stop writing GunFAIL diaries. It’s a fact.
Other notable gun mishaps include a kindergarten teacher in Guns Everywhere Georgia, who merely did the unthinkable, thankfully, as opposed to the horrifically unthinkable. That is, she showed up at work drunk, with a gun in her purse, which she left under the desk in the classroom. But what she didn’t do was have her gun discovered by one of the students. So shut up, liberals! That totally won’t happen with armed teachers! Unless it does! In which case, Freedom! And also, “suck it,” snowflakes!
There was also some “good” GunFAIL, too. A racist would-be murderer accidentally shot himself when he tried to shoot a co-worker at the Desert Hot Springs, California Autozone store where they both worked. Rudy Arana allegedly brought a sawed-off shotgun to work and announced he was “there to kill a n----r.” Well, he didn’t. Instead, he shot himself in the “lower torso” when he pulled that shotgun out of his waistband, which is really no place to keep a shotgun, not that I want to counsel him in any fashion.
Finally, our title story, involving the “security” guard (and former Tulsa County “reserve deputy”) at a Tulsa, Oklahoma gun show who accidentally fired a gun he was handling, injuring a fellow officer also working “security” that day. Yes, reserve deputy Robert Bates was the one who accidentally shot and killed Eric Harris at contact range in 2015, somehow thinking he had drawn a Taser rather than a firearm. But you would have most recently seen Tulsa’s reserve deputies in GunFAIL in connection with a gun accident on February 23 of this year, when a former reservist’s gun “went off on its own accord” inside the the White River Fish Market restaurant in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Way to go, fellas! Good thing their training and certification methods are impeccable! Otherwise, you’d start to think that having this many accidents among them was due to some laxity in standards, or something!