And gun owners everywhere look like reckless jackasses. Â The media is quick to pick up on it, and then you have the Brady Campaign. Â From the OpenCarry forum:
An AD happened near the end of the picnic while a non-CPL holder was unloading his firearm so he could enter his vehicle lawfully. He was at the Picnic with some friends and family earlier in the day. This person is not a member of MOC, Inc.
This is why Michigan needs to allow any person that can lawfully own a handgun to carry it loaded in their vehicle. The less a person has to handle their firearm the less chance for an AD.
This is also a cautionary tale to always be careful when handling any firearm. It should be noted that the firearm was pointed in a safe direction (the ground) when it was fired.
That and the info in the article is all I know of at this time.
I wouldn’t call it an accidental discharge. Guns don’t go off if you don’t pull the trigger. ND, or negligent discharge, is the appropriate description. Â I agree that laws that encourage gun handling are bad, but that doesn’t excuse unsafe gun handling. We’re fortunate in this case that he only broke one of the four rules, and no one was hurt.
Open Carry people represent us all when they do what they do. If you’re going to take on that responsibility, it would be nice if it were treated like a responsibility.
“We’re fortunate in this case that he only broke one of the four rules, and no one was hurt.”
If all 4 rules are followed, no one gets hurt and no one looks like an asshole.
If 3 of the 4 rules are followed, no one gets hurt.
Oh, now I get it. So if I can find one stupid move amongst CCW’ers, I can demand that you idiots stop making us OC’ers look bad? You’re really all over the place on this issue, Sebastian, and you tend to marginalize OC because you seem to think it’s “icky.”
People carrying firearms are going to eventually have a discharge, and if they follow the rules, no one gets hurt (I disagree that a gun cannot go off unless the trigger is pulled, and besides, you’re treating it as if every time the trigger moves it is due to a finger being in contact with it in your rhetoric here).
Now, I realize that in this specific case you’re talking about an OC event, but the presser you quoted handled this the correct way: “if he wasn’t legally required to handle his gun in this place and at this time, this would not have happened.”
“Guns don’t go off if you don’t pull the trigger”
Yes, guns do go off when you do not pull the trigger.
Anytime you are loading or unloading, the weapon may discharge. All the popular platforms use inertia firing pins, 870, 1911, AR15, all have the potential to go bang when you have your boogerhook off the bangswitch.
Four Rules light is always lit. Eez gon, eez not safe.
If this is a case of a true AD, I’ll eat my hat. Those thing can happen, for sure, but I would put them in the category of rare, especially compared to booger hook on the bang switch.
M Gallo:
Everyone has a responsibility to do everything possible to avoid a discharge in a public place, whether carrying openly or concealed. That goes double if you’re at a pro-gun event. I’m not saying that the law isn’t bad, and shouldn’t be changed. But that doesn’t excuse the ND. I would also suggest that if you’re going to have an open carry event in a state where you can’t carry in a car, and know people are going to be loading an unloading firearms, you have a clearing barrel available, or at the least a bucket of sand. You still might hear a loud bang, but you’ll have an easier time defeating charges of reckless use if you do.
I don’t buy the nonsense that everyone will have an ND at some point. If you follow good gun handling practices, it doesn’t have to happen.
I question the assumption that the negative “black eye” consequences outweigh the positive consequences of OC publicity.
I suspect that it is based not upon objective observation but instead upon incorrectly projecting one’s own great familiarity with the topic and issues onto the average person.
I don’t think the majority of people even have the faintest idea that open carry is legal. Thus, as a rule, whenever the gatekeeper media allows the mere mention of the possibility, it seems to me to be far more potentially advantageous to OC than disadvantageous because of the slanted context in which it is presented. It would take an extraordinarily and extremely negative context to overcome that benefit.
This has been, BTW, my own direct activist experience with a similarly censored and emotionally charged issue. It is far better for us to have our issue addressed by the gatekeeper media simply because of how it undermines and invalidates the common taboo against discussing it at all.
Guns don’t go off if you don’t pull the trigger? Sorry, but it has happened to me with a single-shot rifle: insert cartridge, close but not lock down bolt, BANG. One hand on bolt, one hand on forestock. Neither on trigger.
I shouldn’t have said it implied it can’t happen, ever. But it’s decidedly a very low probability event in a reasonable carry gun.
When I first saw this post I had a knee jerk response and almost replied with a comment I might have regretted.
But I’m with M Gallo above. I was with you, Sebastian, right up until that last line. You’ve got a problem with open carrying in general and with this post you’ve demonstrated that you will take any opportunity to blast them. Similar to your criticism of GOA.
Some of it is justified, some not, but don’t think you don’t affect your own credibility when you pounce when you would have shown better judgement by acknowledging that they (open carriers or GOA) do get it right probably more often than you are willing to admit. Heck, you’ve done that for Alinsky, forpetesake!
All of what you said is true except that you’re taking open carriers to task for “doing what they do,” that you grudgingly accept. Yes, it is a “responsibility” but it is an inalienable right that’s just as protected as conceal carry (your post a while ago about “signals” notwithstanding).
This post demonstrates conflation. Your conflating your opposition (or at least leeriness, or over-cautiousness) of open carrying with the bad image an AD or ND can give gunowners.
(I do, however, take vociferous issue with what many in the open carry movement say…and that is the “open carry is the right, conceal carry is the privilege” mantra I’ve heard from many of them when they speak with the press. I’d like to know where they pulled that out of.)
I would have pounced on this had it been any kind of picnic of people claiming to represent gun owners. If there was an ND at, say, the floor of the NRA convention, I would have pounced on that too.
I will fully admit that I do not view open carry as a form of activism in a favorable light (that’s different from open carry as a form of carry). And I did not always have that opinion. I used to be all for it until the jackassery got out of hand here in Pennsylvania.
But even so, I wouldn’t put open carry activism in the same class as GOA. That would be an insult to open carry activism I wouldn’t make.
Let’s also not overlook that MI Open Carry’s web page has no statement about the incident on their front page. Someone ND’d at one of their picnics. Don’t you think the public and the media deserves some kind of explanation?
You can bet if this had happened at a PAFOA event, there would have been a press release about it.
You want open carry activism to be treated seriously, you have to be serious.
So just because Pennsylvania got eat up with the jackass, the rest of us have to suffer? Wow, that sounds like something MAIG might say.
And when does my legal open carry become open activism.
I thought the media report linked in the original post was actually pretty fair ….. I didn’t go to see what the Brady bunch had to say since it probably had something to do with, let me guess, guns are bad. What would you expect?
And what would you have MI Open Carry say? I generally don’t think the media is owed jack bone of an explanation, and the public not much more, And I found the forum thread that you linked to in the ‘Hot Topics’ section of their site … isn’t that enough for you? Or would you rather they fire up the Brazen Bull?
I like reading your blog Sebastian, but I’m with markofafreeman …. your condescension degrades your stature.
It becomes activism when you do it to make a point rather than doing it because you prefer it or because it’s more comfortable, or because the circumstances make open carry easier. Having an open carry picnic is making a point. A point that’s rather negated when someone shows up and has an ND.