Years ago I was handed a used .45, by a young man behind the counter at a Pawn shop where I used to buy a lot of guns. It was pretty worn but was priced to sell and it was cheap.
He did a fair job of it, he turned away,racked the slide back and removed the empty magazine. He then handed it to me.
Without even thinking, I looked into the chamber and lo and behold, there was a live round in it. I held the gun down and re racked the slide to eject it and there it stayed.
Come to find out, that gun had been checked several times by various individuals and NONE of them noticed the live round. The extractor had been damaged to the point that it would not extract the round.
I brought it to his attention and he freaked out. The owner of the shop's face turned pale as he realized what could have happened. He took the gun and put it in the back of the shop where he fixed guns and extracted that live round and eventually replaced the extractor.
It was miraculous that someone didn't pull the trigger to see how it felt. Had that happened, there is no telling what could have happened.
I learned right then and there, I don't care if a gun has been checked a hundred times, I WILL check it myself.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another time, I was at a gun show in at the Little Rock Fairgrounds and a dealer shot off a Raven .22. The bullet went through a table, bounced off of the concrete and stuck somewhere up in the roof. After that you could have heard a pin drop. There was several thousand people in attendance, it was standing room only. That was another miracle.
The thing was, the gun had been checked by security and had the customary zip tie run through the open slide. The dealer bought the gun, cut the zip tie off, dropped the slide and the slide motion fired the .22 round. That round was in the chamber the whole time and no one noticed it, not even the dealer.
A gun is a machine and that machine ,like any other machine, is prone to mechanical failure. Sometimes it results in a discharge. More often, that machine performs exactly as it is supposed to and bad things happen because the person operating it lacked the skills to do so.
You have got to be smarter than the machine and check the thing every time someone hands one to you. Its the only way to be safe, there is no other way.You cant assume that it is safe and you cant trust anyone else to do it for you.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Most of us remember the ATF agent that told the class that he was the only one "professional enough" to carry a gun and a minute later he shot himself in the leg with the Glock .40 in front of a class room full of kids.
What most people missed was the fact that he showed the gun to a teacher and asked him to confirm it was clear. The teacher said that it was.
The agent did not know if that teacher knew how to check for a live round, he just ASSUMED that he did and he took him at his word. That was his first mistake. His second mistake was believing it. His third mistake was a negligent discharge and he was lucky that he only shot himself and not some other.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The bottom line is this...
It is YOUR responsibility to always check for a loaded gun, no one else's. If you bust a round off and bad things take place, YOU will be the one sued, not the person that handed it to you. If someone dies, YOU will be the one charged, and no one or nothing else will matter.
banana: Ya, thread coming.) While I was there, I also wanted to check out a few things. One was an IWB holster for my LCP.
