Some good from a tragic event
Or how to actually prevent gun deaths
Whenever there’s an accidental shooting, the press uses passive words about how someone was shot. Or how an object did an action like gun went off. The list goes on. But, generally, they don’t say anything about gun safety and things that actually may be helpful to other people. So, I was rather surprised by this bit in the St. Petersburg Times:
Basic gun safety in Hillsborough County shooting could have saved daughter
Firearms experts across Tampa Bay on Monday said they knew what could have saved the life of federal public defender Melissa Kupferberg.
Basic gun safety.
A message the bears repeating. Basic gun safety would eliminate nearly all accidental shootings. Hats off to the press here for getting that message out.
Update: NSSF has more, along with some resources for the press.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Why is Fritz looking through the magazine? It wasn’t the cartridge in the mag that killed her, Fritz!
The problem with “basic gun safety” is that the people teaching it have absolutely no idea what they are doing.
Fritz should be pointing to a poster of the Four Rules.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Looks like he is looking into the magazine well and out the locked back slide on a Glock.
That seems like a pretty good way to guarantee that the magazine is not in the gun, and by looking through the open top of the slide at the camera (student), it clearly demonstrates where the student is supposed to look.
I am guessing the caption should read
“Fritz Casper of Shooting Sports Inc. in Tampa looks through an empty magazine WELL of a 9mm Glock. He teaches students to never attempt to clean a gun unless absolutely certain it is not loaded.”
You’d think, on an article about basic gun safety, they’d get their captions correct. You know, the basics.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
If that’s what he was trying to illustrate, he should have been looking at an empty chamber.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
One does not look into a chamber; one feels.
The problem with “basic gun safety” is that the people teaching it have no idea what they are doing. And worse, these “teachers” do not know that they do not know.