AAndre Lamont O'Neal, Jr. (courtesy wdrb.com)

“Louisville Metro Police say an 8-year-old boy was shot and killed Saturday night inside of a home in the Shawnee neighborhood,” wdrb.com reports. “Family members identified the victim as Andre Lamont O’Neal, Jr. [above]. “‘We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation. We don’t know whether this was accidental or what we have,’ said LMPD spokesperson Dwight Mitchell.” Here’s how the man responsible describes what happened . . .

Family members say the child had been dropped off at a babysitter’s home on North 34th Street. While there at a gathering with several other kids and adults, police say the 8-year-old was somehow shot.

Elgin Anders admits it was his gun that shot the little boy. He would not say why he had his gun out, but that he was trying to put it away when it accidentally fired.

“I didn’t need it in my hand,” Anders said. “I came out to the grill. I had barbecue sauce on my fingers. I licked the sauce off my fingers. It just slipped right out of my fingers.”

That could be the most incredible description of a negligent discharge I’ve ever heard. If the gun “slipped out” of Mr. Anders’ hands, it wouldn’t have fired. Unless he tired to catch it . . . The question of why Mr. Anders had a gun in his hand is an excellent one. A responsible gun owner doesn’t handle his gun unnecessarily. And always observes the four safety rules – no matter what. Otherwise, this can happen.

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62 COMMENTS

  2. A friend recently convinced me that gun safety courses are necessary. When I see this I’m reminded that he is right.

    • I know of at least one documented instance where someone was killed by trying to grab a gun that fell from his grasp. By lunging to catch it he unintentionally pressed the trigger and shot himself.

      So it was possible that the gun slipped from his grasp and he very quickly (as many do) tried to grab the gun before it hit the ground.

      This is a safety issue that does not get enough attention. If you lose grip of a gun, just let it drop, don’t try to catch it as you risk engaging the trigger.

        • It was probably a 1 in a million occurrence, but my P938 fell and struck a wooden bed frame and clicked the safety off.

        • So you believe an irresponsible person would responsibly engage a safety before being irresponsible with the gun?
          Anyone putting the safety on is either someone that wouldn’t mishandle the gun to begin with.

        • A generally responsible person can have their gun slip from their hand and go to grab it without thinking. Why do you think we have more than one firearms safety rule? Redundancy in safety is a good thing.

      • Isn’t there also the risk that if there is a round in the chamber and it is dropped onto a hard surface, that some guns may go off?
        Some guns are NOT drop safe.
        I believe that some law enforcement agencies will only buy firearms that have been tested to be “drop safe”.

        • Would be interesting to know the make. Tarsus had a recall on some of it’s firearms with the reasoning of them not being drop safe.

        • A couple of years ago a lady in a town not too far from us dropped her Cobra .380, it discharged, and the round struck and killed her son. State forensics lab drop tested it and determined it was not a drop safe gun. It’s a cheap gun. Wonder if the moron in the article had this type of pistol and it was dropped to the ground/floor and the trigger was not squeezed at all?

      • Yea, same advice goes for those super sharp 8 inch chef’s knives.

        Did I mention I keep my knives super sharp?

        Reaching for and grabbing something you are handling and mistakenly drop is almost an unconscious thing – at least for me, it’s a reflexive action.

        Knife, gun, anything dangerous first of all, do not effing drop it. If you do, do not grab for it. Better to not drop it in the first place, and especially if it’s a gun – not dropping it isn’t terribly hard to do; don’t handle a loaded gun unnecessarily, ever. Always act deliberately, pay attention to what you are doing, and apply firearm safety rules.

        And in my opinion, a mechanically operated safety device then becomes a second, but necessary level of defense for this kind of failure.

        • That was the source of several dishwashing fights I had through the years. Put the pointy end of the knife down in the drying rack (and if the drying rack is too dirty to put the business end of your kitchen utensil on it, then clean the drying rack). Catching the tip on a steak knife in the palm of the hand when you’re reaching for a spoon ain’t fun.

          Anyhow, from the explanation in the article, I keep getting a mental picture of this booze trying to lick the barque sauce off his trigger finger while he’s go it inside the trigger guard.

  3. Well, isn’t it fortunate that there’s a good explanation for the incident. Who could blame an adult for unintentionally shooting an eight-year-old child to death, given that the adult was coping with an excess of barbecue sauce?

  4. I came out to the grill. I had barbecue sauce on my fingers. I licked the sauce off my fingers.

    So, you had your gun out in your sauce-covered hands because… what? You were scraping the sauce off with the muzzle? You were testing it out as a new corrosion inhibitor?

  5. Sad, preventable, and just wrong. Guns can be fun and they can save lives, but this highlights if you have a firearm, there is no excuse for not thinking about everything you are doing all the time.

  6. I’m calling a big B***S*** on this one. Why is someone handling a firearm while cooking on a grill? It doesn’t make sense. Perhaps showing the gun to friends and relatives (in which case WHY was it loaded?)? Using the gun to intimidate the youngsters? Who knows.

    Ignorance is curable. Stupidity isn’t. The stupid was just too strong.

    • Carry Mexican in a pair of sweat pants, the gun starts slipping and falling out, and there’s kids around who aren’t supposed to know your carrying, so you try to catch it…….

  8. Boy, he was a cute little guy. What a tragic and horrible waste. There is no excuse for such an event.

    Perhaps we need to add a fifth rule to the list:

    Do NOT “play around” with your firearm when you are among/near other people.”

      • ^This^ They can make a thousand rules. If you don’t follow the “don’t putcher finger on the trigger” rule then you most likely wouldn’t follow the other 999.

        • I agree to an extent. And the fact of the matter is that our brains are not capable of following the four safety rules while playing around with a firearm, barbecuing, talking, visiting, and …

          In other words we are not good at true multi-tasking. Unfortunately, a lot of us don’t realize just how poor we are at multi-tasking. Therefore my suggestion of a fifth rule: don’t “play around” with your firearm when you are among other people. Something else will be going on and distract your brain and you are much more prone to make a mistake.

  9. Sad…

    Train with your gun, don’t play with it. Certainly not with greasy food and bbq sauced hands. Would have been better to let the gun fall than try to recover it during that fall.

  10. Unfortunately this feeds the anti’s narrative that having a gun in the house causes more harm than not.

    • No, having an idiot in the house causes more harm than good. I store my idiots in holes with bags of quick lime. 😉

      5th rule: Unload and show clear. Everytime you put it away and everytime you pick it up and any time someone hands you one.

      • Doesn’t that go along with treating every firearm as of its loaded though?
        We don’t need more rules, we need more people that follow the existing ones.

        • Rules 2-4 flow from rule 1. I don’t think a 5th rule should be codified but thinking up your own 5th rule helps one understand the 4. I realized a while ago that to faithfully follow the 4 I would have to refrain from handing my gun needlessly. It’s obvious to me now that this flows from the respect due to a loaded firearm, but it took me a while to realize that following the four rules required not giving myself opportunities to become complacent. Sounds obvious now, but there was a time before I realized it.

    • I do not hesitate to say that claim is absolutely true when the gun is in the hands of an absolute moron.

    • In my opinion,it just reinforces the idea that idiots shouldn’t have guns,if he was cooking on the grill and playing with a gun with children around,he’s probably ghetto trash and a convicted felon,I bet he wouldn’t have dropped his 40oz.

  12. One has to wonder what gun he had and what configuration it was in at the time of discharge. Besides the biggest and most important rule to always always always keep your gun pointed in a safe direction. OK, he dropped it and caught it. What gun was it? A 1911 carried in the cocked position? Throw everything out and explain to me the mechanics of how this weapon discharged. I could drop my DA/SA Sig all day and catch it and I seriously doubt I could manage to get a finger on the trigger and be able to engage or otherwise pull the trigger in DA. Maybe if I tumbled down my stairs to the basement with my gun in my hand with my finger on the trigger, it would be possible.
    Little kid gets shot, someones got some splaining to do because like others here, that sounds real hokey to me and I call BS.

    • Mark,

      I have heard anecdotally that it is fairly common for people to try and grab a falling handgun and pull the trigger in the process regaining control of the handgun. As a result, what I hear from everyone is, “If you drop your handgun, do NOT try to catch it — let it hit the floor.” Of course this applies to modern drop-safe handguns. If you were talking about a 1930’s vintage semi-auto with a round in the chamber, you might be better off trying to catch it … I am not sure. Consult with your gunsmith for advice on that.

  14. He looks quite a bit like MY son-who is 23 and was NOT shot at 8…Dumbfook. Lord I hope this human debris never reproduces again. Or gets out of prison.

  15. Great! 8 Y.O. kid has his pic taken by an adult? giving a gang sign. And you wonder about the responsibility for urban crime?

  17. The stupid is indeed strong with this one.
    However he is no different than all the police negligent discharges recently profiled on weaponsman.com
    Their Glocks are always ” just going off” in city council meetings, courthouses and police cars.
    KEEP YOUR BOOGER PICKERS OFF THE BANG SWITCH!

  18. I just did a little googling to whether there were cases of kids accidentally being killed by BBQ grills; just to contrast the various risks aside from guns, as is done with swimming pools, household chemicals, etc.

    Turns out there are some such cases, under whatever circumstances. However, under the same search results, I also stumbled across many more cases of people murdering and grilling their victims on the BBQ grill than I ever would have thought of.

    Man’s inhumanity knows no limits. This is why I carry.

  19. And this is why we are being labeled as uncaring for the children, because some idiot holding a gun while licking barbeque sauce off his fingers. There is no limit to this.

    Plus never put sauce on the meat while it’s grilling. It just burns the sugar.

    • We’re being called heartless because they want to disarm the populous.
      This story is no different than the hundreds of kids dying in hot cars. Or the many cases of “sudden acceleration” where the driver pushes the gas to the floor thinking they were on the brake. One woman crushed her son against the garage wall.
      Negligence can be deadly regardless of firearms so it’s the guns they want to eliminate because they can’t eliminate negligence.

    • Why should “we” be called heartless because of what this guy did?

      While Proggies claim to be “open minded” and “tolerant,” they sure do seem to generalize a lot. Out of one side of their collective mouth, they tell us not to judge all black men by the actions of a small set, or not to judge all Muslims by the actions of a radical few…

      Yet here we are. One irresponsible a-hole doing something with a gun that none of us condone (that is, we point fingers at him for breaking safety rules), and we get labeled ‘heartless’ due to his screw-up?

      Sorry, but no. I’m not wearing that label based on this or any story like this. They want to try to label us heartless because of stuff like this? We give it right back to them. We need to stop letting them define the terms of the “discussion.”

      Make them choke on their own hypocrisy.

  20. Maybe it is just me but I don’t touch, carry, or use anything when my hands are covered in grease, sauce, liquid, food, etc. Its just messy and a good way to drop something or worse. Common sense really can’t be taught effectively.

  21. I suppose it could have been worse had he shot a propane tank attached to the grill, then everyone within a few yards would have been potential victims. Rest in Peace, little dude.

  22. Sad for everybody. Hopefully this guy will learn some common sense. But, as Ron White says, you can’t fix stupid. My prayers and condolences to the family.

  24. I’m I the only one appalled by both this idiot’s lack of responsibility and the way the coverage ignores it also? “Man whose gun killed 8-year old: ‘it just slipped out of my fingers'”. “Elgin Anders admits it was his gun that shot the little boy”. It was my hammer that bashed the kid’s skull in doesn’t sound quite the same, does it?
    It’s as though it was a pit bull that got off a leash, rather than an inanimate tool.

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