It finally happened to me this past weekend. Well, it happened in front of me, to be more accurate. I wasn’t the guy accidentally pulling the trigger, but I was less than three feet from the muzzle when it happened. Way too close for comfort — definitely a sphincter-tightening experience for my two new friends and me. Let me give you the details, and then you tell me: how would you have handled this situation? . . .
We were at the benefit match for the West, Texas volunteer fire department near Marble Falls, Texas. It was a beautiful day, and I was having a blast. So to speak. There was a bay dedicated to just fooling around where they had a full auto AR-15, and I had wandered over there to see if they would let me stick the upper to my new 300 AAC Blackout gun on their full auto lower and take it for a spin. The answer was yes, and the result was, as you’d expect, awesome.
While I was waiting around and schmoozing with the guys there, one of the other shooters on the line who had a heavily customized suppressed GLOCK handgun was showing it off to the guy running the machine gun. The slide was forward, on the gun, but the magazine well was empty. I assumed that the gun had been unloaded. I was wrong.
As he demonstrated each new feature, the muzzle of the gun moved around wildly. I didn’t consciously keep track of it the way I would a loaded firearm, but I’m pretty sure at a couple points it was aimed at human flesh of some sort. When the guy finally came to showing off the trigger, he held the gun vertically with one hand on the front of the silencer, and touched the trigger.
As usually happens when you pull the trigger with a round in the chamber, the gun fired sending a round through the tin roof of the range. And everyone froze.
Clearly, the gun still had a round in the chamber despite the magazine being removed. And as we assessed the situation, making sure that there were no injuries (besides the now-ventilated tin roof), the guy tried to continue his explanation of how awesome his trigger was, ignoring the fact that he had just sent a round sailing unaimed on a crowded range.
So there’s the scene for you. ND straight up through the roof, and the accidental trigger puller refusing to stop talking about his awesome customized GLOCK long enough to do anything about it. How would you handle that?