Irresponsible Gun Owner of the Day: William Daniel Glosson

1. So Lasonya (good grief!) fired one, did she? Which one, the loaded one or the unloaded one? Were the inhabitants of the car questioned to determine the proper spelling of the word “moron”?

   • Right? So much that they did wrong….

   • … or the spelling of the word “lasagna”? How about “agita”?

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiNirIOSyuA

2. “Oh, and always keep a gun pointed in the safest possible direction.”

   The back of Ms. Glosson’s head was the safest possible direction.

3. I have to believe that, even if I had never handled a gun before and never had any firearms safety training, I still wouldn’t point one in the direction of someone’s head and pull the trigger.

   But that’s just me. For some people, the elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor.

   • You’d be surprised.
     Give most untrained people a gun to pick up and how do they do it? Trigger finger right in the trigger guard.
     Hell, go watch customers at your LGS. They don’t keep the guns pointed at the “point guns here” signs. They point the guns whichever way their hands are pointed: at customers, at the clerk, at themselves. If a clerk behind the counter walks into a customer’s sight picture, does the customer rotate the gun up or down away from the clerk? I always do, but I’ve only seen a few other people do it.

     I’d be interested in running an experiment:
     Get a bunch of inert firearms and put them in a classroom. Offer a free gun safety class for complete newbies. At the beginning of the class, have the instructor place the inert firearms on a table, call the students up, and say he wants them to familiarize themselves with the guns they’ll learn in the class. Then he gets an emergency call and has to leave the room. Do they follow any safety rules? Or do they point guns at each other?

     And I have three variants:
     * All students are actual test subjects. Don’t try to influence them or provoke actions. See if they do unsafe things. See if people ask others to be safe. See how the unsafe react to that.
     * Have a confederate in the group. Have this confederate do unsafe things like pick up a gun and turn towards people, while talking about it, with a lot of hand gestures. See how people react to the unsafe person.
     * Have the confederate be a safety nag, telling people not to point the guns around. See how people react.

     • The word “confederate” is sooooo non-PC that it’s been banned from Soviet American universities.

       • I’m such a bad person I use the word “discriminate” to mean “differentiate between two or more people/things”.

     • My favorite is when the clerks clear it and the put it on the counter, pointing directly at themselves. When you go to pick it up, you are required to handle while pointing at them – even if it’s to rotate it 45 degrees first. Couple with your accurate observation about fingers on triggers, negligence will happen eventually.

       • My guess would be that’s the way they are *required* to put the gun on the counter. Seems like it will assure that they really did clear the gun, it IS empty. Also seems like a good plan. Once upon a time, I had a job wherein the guard who protected our aircraft had to board the aircraft last, just before we taxied. Very loud (4 jet engines running just on our aircraft, other aircraft all around us also running, usually very cold (wind chill coldest I saw was -100 degrees with blowing snow). His procedure was to clear his M16, then hand it up the ladder to a crewmember butt first (ie, pointed at his own head). If somebody is going to be shot, it will be the guy responsible for the safety of the gun. Does that not make sense?

       • About a year ago My wife and I were at firearm show in Council Bluffs Iowa, we were at the largest vendor there, when I asked to see a firearm the guy took it out of the case, didn’t clear the firearm and slid it over to me, the guy walked away to help someone else and he did the same thing, I watched him take a gun that someone else just left on the counter and stick it back in the case without clearing it. My wife and looked at each other and then turned and left the area without even picking the firearm up to look at it. We haven’t been back to that gun show since.

4. “Handed one of the UNLOADED guns”…I believe a correction is in order? Unfortunately all gun owners are painted with the same dumbazz brush.

   • No. You apparently didn’t read just a bit further to “and he also handed her a loaded gun he already had in the truck.”

5. Mr. Farago covered all the relevant points. Always hand a firearm to another person with the action open and visibly unloaded in both the chamber and magazine/cylinder. The only exception to this rule would be during a life/death emergency where you are handing a loaded firearm to another person who is assisting in defense of innocent life.

   • Thanks. I hadn’t heard any of that around here before.

     • No, thank you. No one around here makes arbitrary, sarcastic comments anymore.

       • That’s true–I have noticed a complete dearth of arbitrary, sarcastic comments of late. It’s similar to the total disappearance of the word ‘cuck.’ It’s been literally eons of our years since I’ve seen that word here. Oh, how I miss the days when all of those folks that had just learned that new, magical word were using it proudly and indiscriminately, probably because it sounded like that OTHER ‘uck’ word and made them giggle like schoolboys getting away with being potty-mouthed without actually saying THE ‘uck’ word.
         Alas. May we all hope that there will rapidly be a new magic word invented that we can use to describe anybody that we disagree with on any known subject, one that sounds disgusting and makes us sound foolish. It can’t come too soon.

       • Cuck. There’s a word I don’t miss.

   • When possible, don’t hand guns (especially handguns) from one person to another. It’s an invitation for disaster. Set it on the table/counter and let the other person pick it up.

6. I think that, in addition to the basic safety rules, it is good policy to simply not hand somebody a gun. I mentioned to a friend in church I had just bought a new Ruger. He wanted to see it. I told him he was welcome to come out to the estate and shoot it with me.

   Unless I see something that needs to be shot, my rule is “keep it in your pants.”

   • I agree unless it is a BBQ gun, meant to be admired. Then it should be unloaded, of course.

7. I wish I knew why this particular gun show brings out the irresponsible gun owners – back in early 2013 there was also a shooting at the show. In that case, a cased shotgun was presented to the security officers who were making sure guns were unloaded. The owner reached in the bag to remove the gun from the bag and got his finger on the trigger and discharged the loaded gun. One of the officers caught a small portion of the charge. Needless to say, security and check-in procedures were revised after that incident. The major one was that attendees bringing in guns have to go through a separate door and side room to check in the guns, verify they are unloaded and secured with a zip tie.

8. She didn’t accidentally fire the gun, she negligently fired the gun… a significant difference. Short of exceptionally rare circumstances typically involving antique or un-maintained firearms, it’s always a person’s fault, guns simply don’t “go off” nowadays.

   That being said, you generally shouldn’t hand people loaded weapons either, so shame on William for creating a terrible situation. I’m curious whether the bullet actually struck Alyssa, or if it was only muzzle blast. Regardless, I can only imagine William was showing Lasonya 2 concealed carry pistols, and he handed her his weapon for comparison’s sake. The side effect is that I’d imagine Lasonya has lost all interest in obtaining a defensive firearm at this point.

   • We can hope. And her sister Parmigiana, too.

     • If she was a non-gunowner, she may not have been aware of the 4 rules. That doesn’t remove responsibility from her for pulling the trigger, however this incident (assuming this was her first contact with firearms) doesn’t explicitly mean she couldn’t ever handle firearms safely.
       Now if she’s been around guns all her life, been shooting before, etc then by all means, be hopeful she doesn’t place anyone else in harms way. Unfortunately we can probably assume William would be the one teaching her gun safety, a topic he’s clearly not qualified to instruct on.

     • “And her sister Parmigiana, too.”

       Let’s not forget her mom, Mrs. Manicotti.

       Why am I suddenly hungry?

   • If she was a complete muggle, then’s she’s off the hook, to my mind. The negligence was 100% Mr. Glosson.

9. So… the person who handed over the loaded gun was the one wounded?

   Seems fair.

   • No, I think the husband handed a loaded gun back to a third party in the back of the truck, who wound up shooting his wife beside him in the front seat.

     That being said, the original source article could definitely benefit from a re-write, it’s very poorly written.

10. Just before I left NC in 2004, Donny Harrison had just been elected sheriff. I met him exactly once and chatted with him for perhaps two minutes. He seemed like a good, level-headed, no nonsense man. I just saw strong evidence for this in one of the news accounts I read about this bad event. After he explained what had happened to a bunch of newsies, he said:

    Anytime you mess with firearms, be careful.

    Laugh out loud! I love it! Straight, simple, to the point, 100% accurate, and with none of the bloviating cop-speak we’re used to reading or hearing especially when one of those nasty awful evil ol’ guns is involved.

    • Donnie Harrison is a big dumb-F’er who won’t sign off on SBRs and suppressors despite an explicit law passed by both houses of NC congress and the governor. He just a POS Leftist that unilaterally ignores laws he doesn’t like because his azz is covered by Holder and now Lynch. He runs Wake county which is a central relocation area for dumb leftist northerners who voted for HRC.

11. His wife got shot. Isnt that enough punishment for the moral preeners on here? Never did understand the sadist desire to rub it in when some dummies screw up. If he had left the gunshow, put his car in drive instead of reverse and rammed thru the front gate, would it have been written up by self righteous bloggers so a coterie of moral preening infallibles could rub it in?

12. What people have to remember is that most of their training is from watching TV. Anyone who’s actually ever made a trip to a legitimate gun seller, sees what you are supposed to do. Clear the gun at least twice before handing it over to a potential customer. But back to my first sentence, most people get their training from TV and you can see how poorly guns are handled in the average TV program. I don’t want the mythos of a show to be ruined by safer handling but maybe a quick 5 second disclaimer ad before and after the show to state that guns were not handled safely because it’s a fucking TV show. Don’t be an idiot and do what we do, learn the proper way to handle guns. Just sayin’.

13. Someone may clear a gun when they hand it to me but I check it when it gets in my hands. I only check it once I believe my eyes. I have had a gun with most days since 1957 when I stated driving.

    Treat all guns as loaded all the time. Don’t leave them loaded where others can get them.

Comments are closed.