(February 25, 2014 at 8:28 am)Rahul Wrote: What an idiot. One of the most important laws of gun safety is to always treat a gun as if it was loaded. He broke this not once, but three times in a row.In my (very limited) experience, this is a common failing around guns. The lack of experience mixed with the "can't happen to me" attitude makes people frighteningly irresponsible.
When we were in Ohio back in October, we were staying at a friend's home. He had some BB guns that his son and my friend's son enjoyed using for target shooting. I did some target shooting myself with them (first time EVAR) and enjoyed it, and I was also very conscious about where I was pointing the guns and not putting a finger on the trigger until I was ready to fire. My friend, though, had the dual bad habit of 1)waving the guns around with no care whatsoever and 2)getting aggravated when we admonished him to be careful. He insisted that he was NOT handling the guns improperly, even as he waved them around while talking.
BB guns are not toys, they're perfectly capable of causing serious injury and even death. I enjoyed the target shooting and would not mind doing it again --even with real guns and live ammo, which I bet would be awesome-- but I wouldn't feel safe around the combination of my friend and guns, because he (an otherwise sensible and cautious person) simply doesn't seem to recognize how dangerous he is with a gun in his hands.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould