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.
@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.
The Gaffer
Andrew Zonenberg
aurorus