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Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

Earlier this year, my child got to experience this. An anonymous tip led to a lockdown and police investigating an area of the school. During that investigation, one of the officers accidentally discharged their weapon. That, of course led to numerous calls to 911 about shots fired and a full-on response. The first I heard about any of this was getting a call from my child, who was running to the woods to hide.

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The proper term here would be a negligent discharge. Nobody ever accidentally fired a gun. They either meant to or they were handling it in a negligent manner. The general lack of training and professionalism with American police is appalling. They rarely get sufficient range time to be proficient with their weapon. let alone stress inoculation so they can perform when the time comes.

There are cases of weapons discharging due to malfunctioning weapons, holsters and ammunition instead of negligence. This is why the first rule is, never point your weapon at something you do not wish to destroy. Typically they mostly happen while loading or unloading a firearm. These are typically called "Accidental Discharges" instead of "Negligent Discharges."

https://www.guncrafttraining.com/articles/negligent-discharg...

germany records every single bullet its police officers fire.

do you want to know the number of bullets fired?

According to a research brief by the Center for Homicide Research1, there were 11 cases of accidental discharges by police officers in Germany from 2000 to 2012, resulting in one death and six injuries. This means that on average, there were less than one accidental discharge per year in Germany during this period. gpt

The injury rate seems extremely high - 11 accidental (assuming includes negligent) discharges and 7 of those results in injury or death. Unless those are self-inflicted (glock foot), that seems really high.

> germany records every single bullet its police officers fire.

I really wish we hadn't blocked this level of record keeping in the USA. All our data has to be gleaned from other sources. The FBI tries to collect this data, but 40% of law enforcement agencies don't provide it.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/14/what-did-fbi-d...

Indeed and discharges due to malfunctions are usually called accidental discharges. Assuming it's the first time of course. If you continue to knowingly use a broken gun after you've learned its broken then it becomes negligence.

If you follow the rules of firearms safety you will never have a negligent discharge, but you may have an accidental one. Personally my favorite personal rule is "Don't need a firearm, don't have a firearm." The dang things are more dangerous than a pet Boomslang. Some people are willing to take the risk, but I'm not.

"Gun's don't kill people. Blood loss and organ damage do."

There are plenty more bumper stickers where that one came from:

https://topatoco.com/collections/wtnv/products/cpb-wtnv-nvnr...

An officer accidentally fired a gun? Is it just me or is that something that just should not happen?

On average cop training with firearms in the US is quite minimal. Most cops are extremely bad shots when intentionally firing their guns.

There's a long, long history of cops negligently firing their guns, even after gun safety tech progressed to the point where true accidental discharges are neigh impossible. It's always negligence now.

"Glock leg" was a common trope among cops, because so many of them were shooting themselves in the leg. They sued both Glock and Sig multiple times because cops were convinced it must be the guns fault. Spoiler alert, it wasn't (well, some hand waving on a certain sig issue, but glocks are impossible to fire without pulling the trigger).

I shoot competitive 3p rifle, and the closest range to me is a cop range. I've seen cops struggle for 5 minutes trying to figure out how to put their targets up. We have rules against drawing from holsters because cops have shot themselves in the leg so frequently (though the cops are still required to do it for testing lol). I've seen cops shooting rifles at the pistol range, which destroys the backstop. I've seen cops shoot at targets on the wrong range. Like literally other people's targets, up in the air, from a different range. In the direction of an interstate freeway, at an upwards angle. I've seen cops (with aforementioned rifles) shoot groups at 50 yards while rested on a bench that are straight up worse than what I can do at 200 yards while standing up. (For an average non-olympic-tier competitor, you'd expect 200 yard standing groups to be 4-5x larger than 200 yard bench groups, and closer to 20x+ larger than 50yd bench groups).

The average cop doesn't know shit about guns, and doesn't care. And largely that would be fine because most cops will never draw their guns in the blind of duty. Unfortunately we've built up a law enforcement ethos in the US where every cop must be armed even though they really shouldn't have to be.

"but glocks are impossible to fire without pulling the trigger"

Not exactly true. See the gen1 and early gen2 slam fire issues. The fact that it is not widespread knowledge is just kudos to their "safe fire" marketing. And of course mechanical failures in any make/model could be a factor too. But as you said, it's almost always negligence and not a true accident.

Yea, very similar issue with early Sig p320. But the lawsuits still keep coming in after it's mechanically impossible now.

(And in sig's case their firing pin block interacts with a lug attached to the pin, which could hypothetically shear, and since it's fully cocked striker then it's a single point of failure)

I think gen4+ glocks are fully cooked now too. Not sure if they have multiple lugs/blocks or what.

Still half cocked. It's a big part of why Glock triggers feel so crappy.

But imo the relevant part here is more that Sig decided to have the firing pin block... not block the firing pin itself, but a lug attached to the firing pin. A lug that can, extremely rarely, shear off.

I've noticed that any product that markets it doesn't have a problem I hadn't thought of ("runs silent", "rust-proof can", "doesn't randomly fire") inevitably has exactly that problem.

Not that brandishing such a glock should cause slam fire.

should not

Oh yea I'm pretty sure that for decades new york intentionally issued guns with 2.5x heavier triggers because cops couldn't keep their fingers off the trigger. Like in the 10+ pound range.

This of course very much hurts accuracy when intentionally firing the gun, and makes bullets more likely to go places they shouldn't.

There were a number of accidental discharges in Norway while police were temporarily (for more than a year?) permanently armed.

Partly because training assumes guns will be locked away until going into imminent dangerous situations - so when carrying - the training/instruction dictates a round should always be chambered.

AFAIK this how you get Glock foot too - drawing a weapon with round chambered, rather than draw-load-fire.

> AFAIK this how you get Glock foot too - drawing a weapon with round chambered, rather than draw-load-fire.

Not quite - it's usually on the reholster, not the initial draw. Crucially, this means that the policy of carrying without a round in the chamber can still yield the same failure case, because if the weapon is fired, it'll be loaded when you go to reholster unless you intentionally clear the gun every time. Which, for a failure case caused by literally keeping your finger on the trigger while reholstering, is not gonna be avoidable if that's your bar. Someone who hasn't trained enough to meet the most basic of 8-year-old kid-level gun safety isn't going to be reliably clearing before reholstering either.

It’s common advice to keep a round chambered and I’m sure (almost) all cops in the US do. You might not have both hands free to chamber the round and it takes time when you may not have any.

It really shouldn’t matter as long as your finger isn’t on the trigger until you’re ready to fire. Personally, I still like guns that have a safety lever. I understand that people in a stressful situation might forget to flip it but training should largely circumvent that.

"On average cop training in the US is quite minimal."

Fixed it

Ha fair. Here it's less than 1000 hours total training. Less than half a year.

It generally takes longer to become a licensed cosmetician.

Yes, it's very simple. If you do not wish to shoot the gun, do not put your finger on the trigger. Firearm safety really is that straightforward, which is why it's so stupid when stuff like that happens.

/s?

The NRA used to be mostly focused on gun safety, and not lobbying for gun manufacturers in DC. Their courses were much more involved than "don't pull trigger if you don't want to shoot".

Other pieces of advice included "keep the safety on", "never aim at a person" and "always assume the gun is loaded, especially when cleaning it".

They used to even teach those classes in schools decades ago.

My high school in Iowa had a shooting range (not sure what type) that had long been coordoned off. In 2007 it was unthinkable that people used to be able to come to school and practice shooting.

Some schools use gyms or hallways for air rifle competition still. Most have to go to a range if they also compete with 22s anyways.

I don't think we've figured out a good way to prevent this sort of thing while also making is possible to be able to fire the gun quickly when needed.

The easy answer is "more training," but I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that police in many places don't find themselves in dangerous situations that often and training only goes so far.

No accidents should happen, obviously.

But put poorly trained people in the most terrifying moment of their lives with a dangerous weapon in their hands, and you better believe there are going to be some accidents. Thus: the whole problem.

Some unarmed kid running for their life down the halls is gonna get shot by a police officer sooner or later.

It definitely shouldn't happen. By all accounts, including video surveillance available of the incident, the officer's finger wasn't on the trigger, but was on the side of the barrel, which was pointed downward.

Tazers have electronics that record when they're used, and disperse little papers to mark where they were fired.

It's crazy to me that we haven't enforced a similar audit log on police firearms, such as when they were withdrawn, armed, and used.

Oh, believe it, every time a police officer suffers an inadvertent firearm discharge there is plenty of "auditing". He'll likely be off for at least 3 days and undergo additional training and be kidded for years.

But if no one was harmed he'll be allowed to carry a fully loaded firearm again, unlike Barney Fife:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_Fife

When I was a school-aged child in the 80s and 90s here in Canada, we used to get routinely evacuated because people would "phone in" bomb threats.

"Swatting" to me just seems like a nuanced evolution of that same phenomenon. Only I thought it was that targets were now peoples' homes and the Internet has made it so that targets and perpetrators could be much farther apart from each other.

Other than that, given that "reporting a false threat against a school in order to trigger a response" was happening when I was in school 30+ years ago, I can't help but wonder "what's the 'news'?"

With a bomb threat you are gonna get a evacuation and a bomb defusal team. With a shooter you are gonna get a SWAT team on edge, ready to shoot someone who might have a gun. Much more dangerous.

Shootings actually happen here. Not infrequently. We're a lot more sensitive to them.

Exactly, bomb threats were the thing back then.

Uhhh that officer has no business handling a firearm.

This is the most American thing I will read today.

I can do better: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/04/us/wedding-shooting-nebraska/...

I can do even better:

https://nypost.com/2023/01/24/kansas-man-shot-by-dog-in-hunt...

(this sort of accident happens a lot in the US).

I doubt it happens "a lot". Accidentally shooting deaths are about 900/yr and I assume dogs are rarely the trigger. Even for hunting accidents, shootings are not the main culprit (it's usually falls).

"During that investigation, one of the officers accidentally discharged their weapon."

I wonder what happened to that officer.

I like to say that accidents don’t exist and this is a great example. Everything people do happens for a reason, and calling things accidents just gives us excuses to not find the underlying reason most of the time. We should not accept “accidental” weapon discharges, especially by police. If you’re not able to control yourself inside a school you have not earned the responsibility of being a police officer.

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