A Texas grandfather who was about to officiate a wedding in Nebraska errantly shot and wounded his own 12-year-old grandson when he tried to fire a gun in the air to get the attention of guests Saturday, according to authorities.
Odessa, Texas resident Michael Gardner, 62, is facing legal trouble after the Pietta 1860 snub nose revolver went off around 5 p.m. and accidentally struck the young boy in the shoulder at Hillside Events, Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office chief deputy Ben Houchin said during a press conference Monday.
The gun fired a blank round that had black powder in the casing that was glued together, the sheriff’s official said.
Before the attention-catching shot, guests were scattered around the Denton, Nebraska venue because the nuptials started late after someone forgot the wedding rings, Houchin explained.
“When he decided to cock back the hammer of this revolver it slipped and it shot his grandson in the left shoulder, causing an injury,” Houchin said, later adding. “What we believe is the glue injured the child.”
The injury was non-life threatening, though the boy still required hospitalization.
“We do not believe Michael intended to hurt his grandchild, but the act was not very smart,” Houchin said.
Gardner was still slapped with a child abuse charge because of the carelessness and the injury to the youngster, the chief deputy said. He surrendered to authorities Monday.
“It’s just kind of neglectful to take a gun out that has blanks and fire it amongst people,” he said.
It was an old school revolver where you have to manually cock back a spring loaded hammer. If you pull it back part way and then gently guide it back to normal position, the firing pin will just rest against the primer (the part of the round that sets off the gunpowder) and nothing will happen. If you pull it all the way back, the hammer locks in place until you pull the trigger, at which point the locking mechanism is unlocked and the hammer is freed to slam the pin into the primer, firing the round. The problem comes if you pull it most of the way back and then lose your grip. In that case, the hammer slams into the round just like if you fired it. Because of the physics involved with pulling back the hammer against a heavy spring (ironically a safety against kids pulling it back), the end of the gun usually gets levered upwards during the act of cocking. So, even if you started pointed directly at the ground, you often won’t be by the time the hammer locks in place. It’s your job as a gun owner to make sure that nothing you don’t mind shooting is in front of the gun at any point during that arc.
Add to this that it was a blank round, meaning there was just gunpowder but no bullet. Usually in a round, the gunpowder is trapped between a big slug of lead (the bullet) and the primer. In a blank, a thin layer of paper and glue is used in place of the bullet to keep the powder from falling out. A lot of people think blanks are 100% safe because there’s no bullet, but at very close range that tiny bit of glue still gets shot out with enough force to penetrate skin.
Thus, the guy is still an idiot for pointing the gun in an unsafe direction while cocking it, even if it’s a blank, but it’s easy to see how a 62yo could lose his grip on the hammer and have the gun go off accidentally in a direction he didn’t intend. And because it was a blank, he likely wasn’t following full gun discipline like he should have been. This doesn’t excuse his behavior (gun owners are literally taught to treat every weapon as loaded and deadly), but it might explain both his behavior and why the article chose the passive “it slipped and it shot” voice. Because basically, he was getting it ready to use as intended and it did magically “go off”, and it also is quite possible that it wasn’t pointed at the kid when grandpa started the task.
Yea, I wouldn’t say “magically go off” but this isn’t the gun misbehaving. It was a negligent discharge through improper operation. Its not a malfunction of the gun.
And to the people who don’t get how old revolvers operate, they can go off without the trigger pulled in a very specific manner that isn’t going to occur without someone actively getting the gun ready to fire. It’s the manual operation of the firing action.
Some newer revolvers will have a mechanism that doesn’t allow the hammer to swing all the way forward without the trigger being in the pulled position, but not all of them so.
And for an example of how dangerous blanks can be, the actor Jon-Erik Hexum during filming took a gun with a blank, held it to his temple and pulled the trigger. The force of the blank killed him.
