It is the Four Rules, not the Four Suggestions.
A robbery trial turned into a killing during an incomparable court room drama in South Africa.
Prosecutor Addelaid Ann Ferreira Watt died Monday when a gun that was introduced as evidence fell and discharged, fatally striking the 51-year-old lawyer in the side, according to Johannesburg’s Sunday Times.
Watt’s death is being investigated as a possible case of culpable homicide. The tragedy occurred in the the eastern town of Umzimkhulu.
Prosecutor killed when gun being introduced as evidence goes off in courtroom
Maybe there will be an investigation and we will find out how that gun was allowed to be loaded. But assuming the gun was safe was a terrible mistake.
And then, of course, is the problem of who was the untrained idiot that had to pull the trigger of the gun in court and for what purpose.
Hat Tip Sean Sorrentino
The article doesn’t speak of trigger pulling, it mentions discharging when dropped. That’s rather strange unless they are dealing with a crappy Saturday night special. It’s still a negligent discharge either way, of course.
Gun safety is well understood among US gun owners. Anti-gun people are generally utterly ignorant of it. And my impression is that gun safety is rarely understood in many other countries. I always like to use the Dutch example of “police fired warning shots” — which means they aimed their fire over the heads of the people they could see, with utter disregard for rule #4. I suspect the people in that court room have no concept of anything remotely resembling Col. Cooper’s rules.
If I had to guess, it would be that the gun indeed discharged after it fell … and someone tried to grab it on the way down.
According to the article I read, from the Daily Mail online, it was a shotgun that discharged when it hit the floor after being dropped. Didn’t say who dropped it. The pellets hit the woman in the hip, she likely bled out from multiple sites – no place to put a tourniquet on that kind of wound. As one of my instructors says, shotguns don’t make minor wounds.