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They can and do. There's chapter and verse on gun safety - handling, cleaning, storage - to deal with the risk of accidental discharge.
If you treat a gun like a toy (and this guy's testimony certainly sounds like he did), it's very possible to fire it by accident.
Right, they have to be mishandled, uncleaned, and not properly stored, so like they said, guns generally don't just "go off".
Some guns are just built like shit.
Laws have been passed to shield gun manufacturers from liability for faulty products.
Still, this case sounded like premeditated murder more than anything else. And that Texas grand jury, and prosecutor, were fine with it because the daughter hated Trump.
I don't see any evidence to suggest the guy was maintaining any of his kit properly.
They can and do when mishandled, which is why gun safety exists to begin with.
"Don't point a gun at anything you don't intend to shoot" is Rule 1 for a reason. And if he was playing with the gun like a toy, it's very easy to believe he fumbled it. The stories of children setting off guns by playing with them are more numerous than you can count.
Not sure what the downvoters are thinking. I was reading through this whole argument about whether or not guns can just "go off" and kept thinking a) obviously there are cases where people fire a gun they are handling unintentionally, whether because they are idiots or the gun malfunctioned. But b) it doesn't make a difference in whether he was negligent because he already was when he pointed it at her in the first place. That's all that should have been needed to get a negligent manslaughter charge to stick, accidental discharge or not, it hit her because he was pointing the gun at her.
Though I don't buy it was accidental at all, given the circumstances. Heated argument about Trump just before she's supposed to leave but first he needs to show her his gun that just happens to accidentally fire while he was pointing it at her?
Jury nullification goes both ways and that grand jury just condoned the murder of someone who opposed Trump.
Its mostly semantics. Dude is saying guns don't just go off because of X, Y, and Z. And people are pointing out that X, Y, and Z are the result of negligence.
People neglecting gun safety is the cause. The gun goes off because of the negligence.
I interpreted their comments as saying the guy was negligent on multiple levels. Like saying he probably was neglecting maintenance to the point where the gun can randomly fire doesn't sound like a defense of the guy to me but more like the gun going off could have occurred because he triggered it himself directly or because he didn't keep it in a condition to prevent it from being triggered indirectly.
Though that last paragraph is the most important part IMO, because regardless of how the gun went off, if he had been following gun safety rules, it should have just resulted in an embarrassing hole in his floor, not the death of the person he was "showing the gun to".
No the fuck they don't.
The only scenario where a gun just "goes off" would be if it were sitting somewhere untouched and and went off. If someone is holding it then they are solely responsible for what happens with it.
That's not what we're talking about at all.
People drop guns. People do stupid shit with guns, like using the butt as a hammer. People try to show off with pistol twirls and quick-draws. People just handle them wrong - tossing them, sitting on them, holstering them incorrectly, fiddling with them nervously.
Plaxico Burress very famously shot himself in the thigh, because he decided to keep a Glock tucked into the waste band of his pants. Nothing about the story suggests it was intentional.
That's got nothing to do with whether it was accidental.
These are talking about fundamentally different things than guns just going off, people generally use that term to talk about stuff like the p320, not people being idiots and causing negligent discharges.
I'll point you back to Burress, whose case was regularly and repeatedly described as such. Nobody was accusing Burress of shooting himself in the leg on purpose, much less as some kind of political act.
That's not the gun just going off, it went off because the trigger was pulled due to not being in a holster.
Anyways, we're just arguing the semantics of uncommanded discharges vs accidental discharges
I think they call that negligence, not an accident.
Accidental negligence - legally referred to as inadvertent negligence - is a standard by which a crime can be adjudicated.