Eight of 32 guns discovered by TSA agents in the last week.

Eight of 32 guns discovered by TSA agents in the last week.

Well, the quiet period in gun cleaning accidents has come to an emphatic end, with the discovery of five such mishaps this week. Among the other most commonly recurring GunFAIL situations: three people were injured in two separate accidental shootings at pawn shops, three waistband ninjas shot themselves in the groin, one cop shot himself, two target shooting accidents wounded three (including a man shot by his 3-year-old son, who shot him with a .22 rifle—was it a Crickett?), two elderly men accidentally shot their wives while loading or unloading their guns, and someone in Rock Hill, South Carolina, accidentally blew a hole in himself. (Rock Hill's eighth GunFAIL appearance.)

There were also some incidents of special note this week. A Lancaster, Ohio, incident in which a gun safety instructor teaching a concealed weapons carry qualification course accidentally shot one of the students in his class. (I wonder if the student, an aspiring elementary school teacher, will have any thoughts about the risk of accidents that might arise from arming teachers in the classroom.) A Dana Point, California, man who bought himself a brand-new AR-15 and accidentally put a round through his apartment wall and shot a neighbor in the head with it. And the young woman in Pennsylvania who, having once been witness to a mass shooting, later bought herself a gun for self-protection, but was killed with that gun the very day she bought it.

Two other incidents of note implicate other current questions of gun policy. In Alabama, a new law went into effect on August 1st which allows employees to bring their guns to work. For those wondering how long it would take for Alabama employees to start accidentally shooting one another at work, the answer is at hand: 12 days. And for those pondering the wisdom of expanding the rights of college students to bring their guns with them to campus (given their proclivity for binge drinking), Western Washington University provides this week's anecdote weighing against.

Mercifully few child victims of GunFAIL this week, although it seems we'll have to reconsider the search parameters and criteria for inclusion on the list to include more stray bullet shootings. Originally, GunFAIL was chiefly about those accidents in which no one had any intention to fire their weapon at all. But that's obviously expanded as we witnessed more, and more types, of incidents that call the many widely-held beliefs about the value of guns into question. With the numbers mounting, there's really no reason not to start counting stray bullet shootings of innocent bystanders, even when the shooter intentionally fires the weapon.

Below the fold, this week's list.

