Florida Father Accidentally Kills Son at Range...

[ogfarmer 138]

[Schrödinger's cat 87]

The first video is a disaster, and she doesn't have a proper grip. The second one seems to have been handled relatively well. Although her finger was on the trigger she kept the gun pointing in a safe direction, and from the slo-mo it doesn't look like she could have shot herself in the leg. That might just be luck though.

[Newtonian 453]

Good luck is when you do everything wrong and it all works out.

 

Bad luck is when you do everything right and it goes to shit.

 

This incident doesn't fall into either one of those categories.

 

Coincidence? No. Not that either.

 

YOU DONT WAVE A GUN AROUND THE RANGE BECAUSE A PEICE OF BRASS IS BURNING YOU! IT'S DANGEROUS AND SOMEONE MAY GET HURT.

 

If you want me to say: Well..... One in a million it's going to hit you just right and in that single instance it's ok to wave a gun around and shoot your kid - news flash - it ain't gonna happen.

 

It's impossible to tell the elapsed time from the news reports. I doubt he had time to make a conscious decision. Should his (correct) reaction been automatic? I'd like to think it should have been but we know very little about the mechanics of this specific accident.

 

No it's not "ok to wave a gun around" but in the tens of millions of circumstances each and every day where individuals pick up a gun it's bound to happen a couple of times, training or no training. Simple statistics. What I would say is that "one in a million it's going to hit you just right and in that instance your reflexes become more important than your training.

 

Sure you can lower the odds by training. You can train a few hours per month to reduce the risk from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 50,000. You can train four hours per day every day to reduce the odds from 1 in 50,000 to 1 in 100,000, or train 8 hours a day to reduce the risk to 1 in a million. You can spend your whole life mitigating or reducing risks of incidents that will never happen in 100 lifetimes. But no amount of training will reduce the risk to zero. That is the crux of my argument. Risk. 

 

You remind me of a chess buddy who used to rag on fellow expert players for losing to scrubs and brag that it never happened to him. "You can always play safe and eventually he'll make a mistake and lose." Well one day he was playing an 80 year old guy who, according to the rating charts, he should beat 999 times out of 1000 games. Ten minutes into the game, on move 12, Mr. Expert resigned. He didn't play badly. The other guy just happened to stumble on 4-5 grandmaster moves in a row by accident. Shit happens.