A case of handgun violence

LAKELAND, Fla. — A Tampa couple and an Irish tourist were shot at a Lakeland gun range after a handgun accidentally fired.

Dear heavens!! Has the handgun been formally charged?

I was not aware that handguns could do anything accidentally, but apparently they can indeed go berserk:

Polk County sheriff's deputies say it's not entirely clear how many times Michael and Sherri Thourot's 9mm accidentally went off Saturday, or what caused the handgun to fire.

Someone needs to alert the Associated Press that 9mm'ers are not accident prone; and that this erroneous garbage article is not only expected from AP journalists, it should be reworded thusly: it's not entirely clear how many times Michael and Sherri Thourot negligently fired their 9mm Saturday, injuring themselves and others.

My blog may be full of any number of grammatical or punctuation errors, but at least I have enough common sense to know that inanimate objects cannot do anything on their own.

But just so you know:

The pistol was a Jennings make.

There's part of the problem right there. What self respecting gun range allows idiots to fire a Jennings pistol?

Update: Another report says that the gun malfunctioned and emptied the magazine without anyone touching it. Sounds a bit far fetched to me, but if it turns out to be true, I'll eat my crow.

Something doesn't seem right with the article though. It says that the gun was brought home from Iraq, and implies that it could have been tampered with. While this could be in the realm of possibility, it's highly unlikely because it's very difficult to bring stuff home from a war these days. Customs confiscates a ton of stuff whether it poses a danger or not, and they perform several very thorough searches.

I had trouble bringing a MSR camping stove home from my second deployment. The base post office didn't bat an eye about the empty fuel bottle - just the stove. And the customs goons in Kuwait confiscated my unloaded Beretta M9 magazines. Ask anyone who's been on a deployment and they will tell you how strict those punks are, and about all the stuff on their banned list. Firearms are one of the top of that list.

They wouldn't let me fly home with empty mags in my checked baggage, so how did he bring a pistol home at all?

(H/T David Codrea at the Philly Gun Rights Examiner)