I was wondering what is considered an “accidental discharge”.
And where would boundry of the discharge of a handgun be considered accidental.
Where is the boundry for negligent vs accidental discharge vs unintentional discharge?
A couple of examples:
I was at a training course last weekend and the class was doing a drill where we would turn 180 degrees while drawin and fire on the target.
The instuctor told us to do it “dry fire” or “dry” first just to practice the motion of turning and presenting the weapon to the target without firing to get comfortable with the movemet and to make sure we don’t sweep any fellow students. Our weapons were hot so we had to keep our fingers off the trigger.
Well, during one of the dry runs a student fires his weapon (His gun was pointed down range at the time). The instuctor calls out and asks who was responsible for the discharge and he was reminded over again that this is a dry run. No shooting!
The rest of the course, which was two days, that student was reminded over again during a dry fiire session that it is a dry run and no shooting!
Is that considered an “accidental discharge”
Another example:
I was at another course and we were all getting ready to take a lunch break. The instructor tells us to download our weapons and make safe.
We were all downloading when a BANG! happened. One of the students was unloading their Glock. Took the magazine out and was pressing the trigger to release the striker but neglected to remove the round still in the chamber. Again, the muzzle was pointed down range and no one was hurt.
Is this an accidental discharge or what?
I was wondering how often these events have occured for other people?
I’ve been to a quite a few training courses and it’s happened twice.
A Negligent Discharge occurs when the gun goes off when you didn’t want it to because your finger touched the trigger.
An Accidental Discharge occurs when the gun goes off when you didn’t want it to but not because of your trigger finger.
Best I can do, and there are other interpretations.
eta: One time I was doing malfunction clearance drills with the carbine. I “set up” my carbine to have a malfunction (or so I thought) but a round wound up in the chamber. When I pressed the trigger to begin the malfunction clearance drill the firearm discharged. Now, some would argue that this was an AD or ND. I would say that it wasn’t because:
I was treating my carbine as if it was loaded.
I was willing to shoot the steel target downrange.
My sights were on target and I was ready to shoot (press the trigger).
I knew my target and my backstop.
So I didn’t violate any of the Four Rules, so I didn’t consider it an AD/ND. Opinions may differ.
Isn’t an Accidental discharge when a guy is not paying attention (due to poor habits and lack of proper training) and puts his boogie picker one time too many inside the trigger guard and then blames his negligent discharge on a mechanical failure of the gun?:eek:
Back when we used to have to requal for CCW in AZ. This was the type of dumb ass that you’d shoot with. I’ve never run into any of these mush heads in training beyond that level though. WOW! :eek:
In the description of the two different students, I would say that the first one simply didn’t understand the drill. He didn’t have an ND, he just didn’t realized or understand that it was supposed to be dry fire or non-shooting. The second example of the guy “unloading” his Glock is an ND - luckily he was muzzle aware.
But I consider a cookoff (or hang fire if you will) to bea negligent rather than accidental discharge IF the bullet is discharged when the muzzle is pointed in an unsafe direction.
If you have obeyed all four basic firearm safety rules and the weapon fires, it is considered an accidental discharge… However, if you have violated any of the four basic firearm safety rules, it is a negligent discharge…
sorry to side track for a moment but re: cook-offs. What are we talking here? 1 second 5 seconds 10 seconds? If say, 5 seconds, and you performed a malfunction drill to eject the perceived bad round, what would happen once it was clear of the chamber?
What you’re thinking of is a hang fire. Cook offs tend to happen more with belt fed weapons where the chamber can get hot enough (due to sustained full auto fire) to heat the powder through the casing to ignition temperatures. This is why machine guns tend to be open bolt weapons (cools the chamber).
Hang fires tend to be an ammo issue. In the situation you’re proposing (ejected the bad round), I’d imagine someone might be picking brass flakes out of their skin, maybe a small burn. I’d hate to see the results of that thing firing while you’ve got the slide partially back-ain’t gonna feel to good on the fingers.
A hang fire is beyond the operator’s control, it’s an AD not an ND.
My definitions: AD mechanical failure of weapon, ND is the result of poor operator headspace and timing.
