The excellent @pluralistic highlighted this Wired article from 2015 regarding car “accidents”. The author’s story mirrors our own loss of our three year old daughter playing in front of our house in 2012. There needs to be greater accountability for people using automobiles.
https://www.wired.com/2015/10/stop-calling-daughters-death-car-accident/
@thegaffer @pluralistic The shooting sports community has been working for years to do something similar, replacing the term "accidental discharge" with "negligent discharge" to reflect the fact that barring extremely rare mechanical malfunctions, guns don't just go off on their own.
If it fires without you intending, it's because you were doing something stupid and dangerous like having it loaded when you shouldn't have, leaving your finger on the trigger, etc.
So just like with a significant number of car crashes, it's not an accident it's negligent behavior on the part of the operator. This sort of terminology should become more prevalent in general.
@eamon @azonenberg @thegaffer @pluralistic
Thats genuinely the preferred policy of the British Emergency Services (Fire, Police and Ambulance), they always refer to a road traffic collision or incident rather than an "accident" (as /someone/ did something incorrect to make a vehicle occupy the same space as another (or another solid object, or simply ran off the road)
@mjr @vfrmedia @eamon @azonenberg @thegaffer @pluralistic TBF unless the pedestrian jumped through the an open window of the car the driver didn't come into contact with them. Until recently there was always the understanding that a car was controlled by a human driver who is responsible for damage or injury caused by a vehicle in their control along with the roadworthiness of said vehicle. Cars, by themselves, are inanimate objects with no will of their own.
I guess it also paints a clearer picture of events as "driver" is a person controlling a vehicle. This could be as small as a unicycle or as large as a container ship. I'm not sure of the legal definition of driver though.
@securedllama @mjr @eamon @azonenberg @thegaffer @pluralistic
for the UK Road Traffic Act 1988 a driver is the person (or persons) controlling the vehicle (a specialist large vehicle might have one person steering and another operating other controls, there's also the case of someone supervising a learner driver on L plates (who needs to be not just a qualified driver but sober and not using their mobile phone!)
If a parked car was left off the handbrake, rolled away and hit a pedestrian then the person who would normally be driving it would be liable (although it might be a different charge than a moving traffic offence).
(Self driving cars are not yet authorised for use in the UK, the legislation is still being debated in Parliament)
@shironeko @thegaffer @pluralistic Sure, but the goal in both cases is to point out that most of the negative outcomes in both cases are the result of someone doing something stupid and easily avoidable, and that they should not be normalized as random accidents but that we should actively work to eliminate them.
There's a subculture that says that if you spend enough time around guns you *will* eventually have an "accidental" discharge. Which is the exact kind of careless attitude the folks pushing the new term are trying to stamp out. There are true accidents - like the time I hit a raccoon that dashed out one car length in front of me on a highway at night - but a lot have identifiable, removeable root causes.
Sure, more cars statistically means more crashes, but there's a lot more in play. Everything from car-centric urban design to engineering of specific roadways to cultural attitudes around vehicle ownership (and alcohol consumption)...
@shironeko @thegaffer @azonenberg @pluralistic
In the USA, it is significantly easier to revoke someone's driver's license than to restrict their possession of guns.
Where I live, which is semi-rural and poorly served by public transportation, if you see a 40-year old riding a bike (or more likely, e-bike) in street clothes, you absolutely know it's because they lost their driver's license.
@RealGene @shironeko @thegaffer @azonenberg @pluralistic
and, I imagine if it's an open carry state - it wouldn't be too out of place to see that same person on a bike or e-bike with a pistol in a holster attached to their belt.
@djsf @azonenberg @thegaffer @pluralistic Reminds me of how often I hear the analogous fact about nuclear bombs
Guns as mini-nukes, huh 🤔
@djsf @azonenberg @thegaffer @pluralistic
The Sig Sauer P320 has entered the chat…
@RealGene @azonenberg @thegaffer @pluralistic RIP Sig Sauer enjoyers.
Another fun one is the CZ 52, an antique Czech semiauto. I had one go off when i turned the safety on once... My finger wasnt even on the trigger lol.
I had it pointed downrange and was still in firing stance so everything was ok. But it was a great reminder why the golden rule of gun safety is what it is:
"Never point a gun at something you wouldnt want to shoot"
Lost a neighbor that way, when their next door neighbor's "unloaded" gun went off during cleaning....
@aurorus I think you misunderstood... if you manage to fire a round unintentionally you've done a lot of dangerous and stupid things. Regardless of whether anyone/anything but backstop got hit.
And this sort of thing should be strongly discouraged rather than normalized as "oh it happens to everyone" which is what calling it "accidental" implies.
The entire point of using the term "negligent" is to make it very clear that the person's actions were far outside the standard of safe and acceptable behavior.
The same thing applies to calling motor vehicle collisions "accidents" rather than being more clear that in many cases the root cause is aggressive or unnecessarily risky driving practices and that we should be working as a society to eliminate them rather than treating them as normal and expected.
@azonenberg @thegaffer @pluralistic
Yep, and thats what makes the Sig Sauer P320 lawsuits and accidental mechanical failure leading to discharge so terrifying.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M2ZwXhZyO1k
That test was done with a blank. And barely moving the slide triggers a fire, without touching the trigger.
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