Not Helping
One of the guys standing outside a recruiting station standing guard negligently discharged his rifle:
A man standing guard outside of an armed forces recruiting center has accidentally fired his weapon.
Lancaster Police tell 10TV 28-year-old Christopher Reed fired an AR-15 rifle while attempting to clear the ammunition from the weapon at the Military Recruiting Center on River Valley Boulevard Thursday afternoon.
The bullet struck the ground and no one was injured.
Reed was cited for accidental discharge in city limits. His gun was confiscated until a court hearing next week.
In response, U.S. Properties Group – which owns the strip mall where the recruiting center is located – requested Lancaster Police “escort all armed civilians from our property.”
July 23rd, 2015 at 6:35 pm
doubt us property is us owned. Seems to have happened pretty quick. why was the guy unloading in the first place. might provide more clues than we need.
July 23rd, 2015 at 6:55 pm
must have been an officer
July 23rd, 2015 at 8:16 pm
Read somewhere he was unloading it to show it to someone. Jackass. Stop touching it!
July 23rd, 2015 at 8:17 pm
I wonder how he managed to fire a round “while attempting to clear”.
1. Remove the magazine.
2. Retract and lock the bolt carrier to the rear.
Bang?
I dunno. It would be interesting to have seen that. So as you’re pulling the charging handle, you have the other hand either working the bottom of the paddle or you have a finger near….the trigger because you’re using the B.A.D. lever, and somehow you touch one off before the carrier comes back. That’s one thing I can figure at the moment.
We’d have to know is routine, assuming he had one. Maybe he didn’t have one.
There’s an old Army method, told to me by a vet years ago. Maybe they still use it;
1. remove mag
2. work charging handle to eject chambered round
3. release safety and pull trigger to drop hammer. Weapon’s condition is now easy to check by attempting to place selector on “safe”. It won’t go into safe because the hammer is down, therefore it is in a safe condition. That’s the assumption anyway, and it makes reasonable sense.
In that method, one failure mode might be;
1. remove mag
2. fail to work charger to eject chambered round, because you’re having an episode of some kind.
3. release safety, pull trigger, Bang!
Beats me. Any other theories? Oh one more;
He lied. He wasn’t trying to unload. He just touched one off and had to come up with a semi plausible explanation on the spot. The “I was cleaning it” bit wouldn’t work because he clearly wasn’t cleaning it, so what’s left?
July 23rd, 2015 at 8:38 pm
Ah crap…
July 23rd, 2015 at 10:41 pm
Stupid is as stupid does.
And nitwits like this one makes us all look bad.
July 23rd, 2015 at 10:47 pm
Seems less likely with an AR, but I’ll tell one on myself that had a similar result…
Sometime in the 90’s I took a big, pretty S&W 645 into trade and decided to use it as a store gun for a while, loaded it and put it on the shelf in my safe next to my customer counter. I did a lot of LEO business and they would come in and hang around and BS. One day a deputy came in that I had known since he came out of the academy, went through being a CO at the jail, and finally got to go on the road in spite of having one good eye and one glass eye (he liked to pop that thing out and hold it his hand to freak people out but that’s another story). Anyway, I wanted to show off that giant Smith auto so all the while talking, I took it from the safe, dropped the mag, racked the slide, and clicked at the floor almost all in one motion as was my “routine” as Lyle put it. Except this time instead of a click, a fucking bomb went off. In what was probably a second or two but seemed like time standing still, I took inventory of my hands and feet, noted the chuck out of the tile floor and concrete underneath, looked to see if there was ricochet damage to the wall beyond…and then turned my head and looked across the counter at deputy Vance, whose face was frozen, wide-eyed and with that fake eye looking like a big glass saucer. I can still see him now, and it is hilarious…but not so much at the time.
To this day, I don’t know for sure what really happened. I would like to say that the ejector malfed and left the live round in the chamber and I didn’t notice, but in subsequent checks it kicked rounds out fine. So more than likely I was distracted by running my mouth and my clearing routine was so routine that I reversed the steps, racking then dropping, then clicking, but in this case KABOOMing. Of course the whole reason for the routine is to ensure that only the floor gets killed if there is a discharge, and to that extent it worked fine; there’s a cell phone store in my old pawn/gun store space and I stopped in a year or so ago and felt around on the new low nap carpet and sure enough there was my 3″ gouge underneath.
When I closed out my bound books to ship them to the feds after I sold the shop and the buyer moved to a new location, I tallied more than 10,000 shootin’ irons in and out in the 15 years that FFL was active (pawned guns as well as retail sales have to go through the same transfer method). That’s a lot of touches, a lot of routine clears, and this was my only ND (there was another where someone else fired but it was my shop and I take the blame for that one too, but that was different). I guess you could say that was a good record; but it only takes one stupid mistake, which this certainly was as I let myself be distracted while doing something that had become too routine, to kill your stupid self, or worse, kill an innocent bystander.
Memorable lesson; nothing should become so routine or automatic that you are no longer paying attention to something so critical and potentially lethal…and deputy Vance? I had to take back the business this year and we talked about it recently; he came in when a few of the old LEO crew, some now retired, were there, and he laughed along when I told them the story, but I noticed he still watched me with a wary eye -his good eye- when I got near the gun case.
Anyhow, I doubt that this is what happened to our young AR guy, but Lyle did ask for other possible explanations, and this was mine.
July 24th, 2015 at 3:23 am
@matt d, Read somewhere he was unloading it to show it to someone. Jackass. Stop touching it!
That’s the same type of story I read.
FAILS!! all around.
Just say no when someone asks to see your carbine!
July 24th, 2015 at 3:46 pm
Frankly, this ND is why the military does not want to arm soldiers routinely. Because this kind of ND affects officers’ careers but getting your soldiers killed by a jihadi does not.
July 24th, 2015 at 10:23 pm
Or they sent a guy to deliberately touch one off so that they would have a fresh excuse to tell all the vets to shove off.
July 25th, 2015 at 3:17 am
You don’t need conspiracy theories to explain this.
July 25th, 2015 at 7:19 am
Right, SPQR, a conspiracy requires two or more persons.
July 25th, 2015 at 12:33 pm
Never learned his nanual of arms. End of story. No news at five.
July 25th, 2015 at 2:31 pm
Conspiracies never happen. This we now know for certain, for if one suggests the possibility of two or more persons working together, he be a madman, and a disgrace.
Ah! But who and how many have worked together, and worked so diligently over such a long period to establish the universal acceptance of the non existence of conspiracies (the UANEC)?
July 25th, 2015 at 3:07 pm
Occam’s razor says a butterfingered assclown with no gun-handling skills is a million jillion squillion times more likely than any elaborate false flag plots. :/
July 25th, 2015 at 3:44 pm
Lyle, yes, well-said and Tam, you’re correct as well on this obvious single person accident.
July 25th, 2015 at 7:01 pm
Just for comparison:
How many times has a law enforcement agent, officer, trainee, suffered – committed – an involuntary discharge?
Were those people pilloried as fools, stripped of their weapons, and required to go to court to defend what the Constitution says is a Right? After all, accidents are, by definition, unplanned and . . . well . . . accidental.
July 26th, 2015 at 12:03 am
Islamofascist nutjobs don’t understand America. They don’t understand our motivations, our honor. If they did, they wouldn’t be death-worshipping terrorists.
They aren’t smart enough to figure out that false-flagging a grass-roots security campaign will trigger a backlash.
July 26th, 2015 at 7:52 am
CarlS,
You’re very correct. And to take it further, if you’re DHS, DEA or BATF, you can kick down the wrong doors and shoot the wrong people and its just another accident that can be overlooked…except maybe have the taxpayers pay off the survivors.
July 26th, 2015 at 11:07 am
See, that’s why we can’t have anything nice.
And that’s why The Army doesn’t let Pvt. Snuffy carry his gun around everywhere.
July 26th, 2015 at 5:40 pm
I heard it reported that the military brass issued a new directive to enhance the safety of recruiting stations. No defensive weapons will be allowed, but they should close their blinds if there is a security risk.
July 26th, 2015 at 8:50 pm
We all knOw them. We had a description of them that fit them perfectly. DUMBASS of the first order. He fills the stereotypical niche that fuels the anti-gun movement. Good job, DUMBASS.
July 27th, 2015 at 8:03 am
I’m sure the Marine recruiter would sign him up for a course where he could learn “inspection arms” well enough to avoid future accidents.
July 27th, 2015 at 10:18 am
Tam,
To try a different metaphor, the doctors I work with like to say, “When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.” That works 99.9% of the time. But sometimes it is a zebra.
Yes, a nervous guy being ordered to clear his weapon might touch one off. But in this country today, it’s no longer a million jillion squillion times more likely that we aren’t being played.
July 27th, 2015 at 4:43 pm
Remedy = training. Like for all other safety problems, once the equipment is sound. And the AR-15 is sound. He failed to clear the weapon. That is why I really, really do not like the language of the rule, “Assume all guns are always loaded.” It requires you to do nothing. It suggests you ought to, but what, exactly? To the pawnbroker, I appreciate your candor, you help us all learn. Clearing the weapon has evolved to a visual and fingertip inspection of the chamber to assure it’s clear. We all have our stories. Fortunately, the rules and procedures are better now than ever. Now, to just get the word out.