Negligent Discharges
BY Herschel Smith13 years, 1 month ago
Concerning one of Tim Lynch’s posts, I commented on a picture that:
Tim, the dude to your right needs to have better muzzle discipline. Tell him to stop pointing that dead blame thing at you! At least his finger isn’t on the trigger.
To which Tim responded:
That was one of the Afridi Tribal fighters and none of them have a clue about gun handling, combat marksmanship, known distance marksmanship, cleaning their weapons etc…. So you end up getting muzzle flagged often which, as I recall, earned you a 5 minute room of pain session in Bravo 1/8 back in the day. You get muzzle flagged a lot from the Brit military too – their weapons handling is also atrocious.-
Yea, I know one Marine who, when he was a Private, had a ND from his SAW, and let’s just say this “room of pain” thing … well, we’ll leave it at that. Room of pain. Concentrate on the word pain. And … no ND ever occurred again from his SAW. Not even one more time.
Recall that Michael Yon discussed an ND from Canadian Brigadier General Menard, and was deeply criticized for it? Well, this is apparently a pattern within the Canadian military.
Officers in the Canadian military were partly to blame for lax firearms safety in Afghanistan, a military judge said as he sentenced a former reservist to four years in jail for fatally shooting a fellow soldier.
Lieutenant-Colonel Louis-Vincent d’Auteuil said on Friday that Matthew Wilcox was well trained and “should have known better” than to point a loaded pistol at his best friend, Corporal Kevin Megeney, on March 6, 2007.
However, Col. d’Auteuil also said senior officers at Kandahar Airfield hadn’t done enough to crack down on improper handling of firearms before and during the deployment of Mr. Wilcox’s unit.
“No discipline was imposed other than warning soldiers,” the judge said, referring to incidents in which soldiers failed to unload the magazines from their pistols after leaving a shooting range on the base.
“All combined brought an atmosphere … where a human being forgot to unload his weapon, pointed and fired at somebody and killed somebody. He is responsible, but the Canadian Forces must be blamed for not having the proper leadership in the circumstances.”
[ … ]
“Leaders, section leaders, the company commanders … created an atmosphere that let soldiers think if they forget to unload their weapons, it was not a big deal,” he said.
As a civilian shooter and firearms owner and holder of a concealed handgun permit, I have more discipline than this. Much more. This behavior is simply atrocious and should not be tolerated in any military anywhere in the world or by civilian shooters either. The U.S. Marines make sure that its men know better with a … well, Tim called it a “room of pain.”
On November 23, 2011 at 10:12 am, carl said:
It is a bit puzzling that the military judge seemed to put more emphasis on failure to unload the weapon than he did on the shooter pointing and firing a weapon at something he didn’t intend to destroy. The shooter also failed to treat the weapon as if it was loaded. It almost seems as if the military judge believes that playing around with a weapon is ok if it is unloaded. That is quite disturbing.
On November 23, 2011 at 11:59 am, Herschel Smith said:
Yea, the judge certainly focused on only one thing, ignoring trigger discipline, muzzle discipline, etc. I don’t know if he’s ignorant or if that’s just some sort of legal thing. Worse still is soldiers who don’t care about trigger and muzzle discipline.