Stovey in the barn. Yup...not up yet. I kicked his foot when I was up there feeding the horses.

Who's fighting? We are having a "discussion".

a

Bushmaster wrote:

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"a" what? Altzheimers, was that what you were about to say? Come on, Bushy. You can remember.

I've had one. It was not my gun, we had a marmot doing damage to fields / culverts that we'd been trying to kill. Was riding with my dad when we spotted it, he handed me a lever action .22 and I jumped out and chambered a round. The marmot unfortunately took off before i got a shot. As I was trying to decock it the hammer slipped and it went off firing into the ground beside me. A bit spooky for sure, got some strange looks from my dad. I had it pointed in a safe direction so no chance of injury but I should have still been more careful to prevent the AD.


-DallanC

Only ever had one UD (Unintended Discharge), was from my Krico .22 bolt action rifle. Turns out the sear on the firing pin had failed...the edge "went south". Don't know why it happened, although the gunsmith who repaired the sear (cut and reset) said it may have had something to do with the way the sears engaged and operated. The firing pin sear is narrow and square cut and the trigger sear is a round pin. The engagement is minimal, or tenuous, at best and the firing pin sear did not appear to be hardened. The firing pin sear is now hardened on my rifle and I check it regularly...to date, no problems.

Interesting that the name Krico appears in a couple of these incidents.

When in the Army, I saw a few cases where the cause of a UD was directly attributed to firearm malfunction and beyond the control of the user.

Unintended Discharges, Accidental Discharges, Negligent Discharges...call them what you will, can and do sometimes fall into the category of being out of the control of the person handling the firearm, although this is rarely the case.

Ah with age comes surety. Every change in state has a cause. Acicdents can be caused by not taking every reasonable action to prevent them from happening. That is negligence. Your civil liabilty is assured and, if you knew your neglect of your duty to take reasonable precautions was very likely to cause death or injury you may also be charged with a criminal offence. I agree with Bushy to the extent that every AD has a failure of some kind as its cause. That failure may be negligent behaviour if reasonable efforts by those responsible for the failure were not taken to prevent its occurance. In judgements of civil liabilty the phrase the party at fault is said to have "Known or ought to have known."

I have unintentionally fired twice. In both cases I was at fault. The first was an exposed hammer shotgun which cocked while I was negotiating some thick scrub. Finger on trigger and I shot an innocent spruce tree. The second was an LMG that I was using with heavy gloves. My gloved finger jammed in the trigger guard and I discharged a full mag. At the time I was engaged in a live fire exercise in sub-zero temperature. I was pointed down range but the order had been for short bursts. The range officer made very sure that mistake would never be repeated.