Timing is everything

Idiots with guns, and tragic consequences

Wow, did I time this right or what? No sooner do I start posting range reports than two cases of extreme stupidity while handling firearms come to light. I'll deal with the first one here; the other one will take up a follow-on post of its own.

This tale comes from the UK's Sun magazine. The headline shows the UK's sublime ignorance vis-a-vis firearms: We were having sex, it went off"

Story goes, some idiot in Dayton, Ohio was getting it on with his wife and tried to "pick up something from the bedside table." The Sun's account is pretty muddy. In one sentence the guy is picking up something from the nightstand. He instead gets the trigger of the pistol and somehow applies enough pressure to fire it. and later they have the idiot hubby's statement that "I picked it up and put it to the side. We were having sex and it went off." Long story short, Timothy Havens' wife is in the hospital in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the chest.

Muddying the waters even further, the Dayton Daily News added a few details. Señor Havens was apparently under a protection order from his wife, and had recently spent two months in jail for violating the order and assaulting her a month after it was filed. He was under an additional court order to attend anger management classes. Havens is currently in jail pending charges for the protection order violation.

I smell a rat here. Something's not right. "It just went off?" Guns don't work that way, hoss. A round has to be in the chamber and the trigger has to be squeezed enough to fire that round. Even if the pistol fell to the floor, it would take more than the shock of the impact to set it off. Here's a guy who already shouldn't be packing heat. Protection orders are supposed to bar individuals from owning firearms. Just goes to show, as Lawdog has pointed out many times, pieces of paper make shitty armor. On the other hand, if it was Carolyn Havens' pistol, and a guy who had beaten her up and was under a court order to stay the hell away was in her house, why didn't she shoot him? Was this really a domestic assault/rape gone wrong?

Only she knows and apparently she's in no condition to tell her side of the story.