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Very strange NY Times story

Right here. The writer is novelist who says that he grew up around guns (literally in a room full of them) and was at least somewhat proficient in their use. He explains how he killed a friend by accident:

"The driver, who worked with the county sheriff’s department, offered me his service revolver to examine. I turned the weapon onto its side, pointed it toward the door. The barrel, however, slipped when I shifted my grip to pull the hammer back, to make certain the chamber was empty, and turned the gun toward the driver’s seat. When I let the hammer fall, the cylinder must have rotated without my knowing. When I pulled the hammer back a second time it fired a live round."

It's hard to make any sense of that incoherence: it looks as if the novelist, knowing absolutely nothing of firearms, tried to write a moving story about them, and the Times editors, likewise knowing nothing about firearms, bought it.

It appears that the writer and the editors don't know much about automobiles, either. He writes that when he grew up, masculinity included "schooling a mean dog to guard your truck or skipping the ignition spark to fire the points..."

If the Times, in its ignorance, will buy stories like that, maybe I ought to write one about the accidental discharge I had after unscrewing the barrel on a Mauser to make sure it was unloaded, or how I fumbled after closing the cylinder on my 1911. And when I grew up, we all know how to check the oil level in the carburetor and make sure that the air filter was keeping the air out.

UPDATE: in the comments, reader Craig was apparently able to confirm the incident happened; the person who died was a student spending the summer as a trainee LEO, which would explain his gun handling, and not showing up on any list of deceased LEOs.



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