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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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Don't forget to have those muffler bearings and air brake pads inspected for wear too!
He's lying. He did something so stupid that killed his friend that he's been telling this lie ever since. He might even believe it by now.
This site reveals no death records for anyone named Doug in Okanogan in 1982:
I'm unable to find evidence on line that the described 1982 shooting ever actually happened. I left a message for the local newspaper, but their on-line archive only goes back a few years.
Has anybody else been able to fact check this?
Completely ignorant and so proud of it. It's disturbing.
A real LEO would not "give" their service weapon to a college kid to "examine", certainly not loaded. How does a "barrel" fall? How does a weapon discharge when you "pull the hammer back"? I began to think that the NYT was beginning to publish the writings of "Mrs. Eldridge's third grade class" but then I remember they wrote much better than this guy.
The story is poo.
OK, looks like it did happen. I just got this from the Omak Chronicle, where someone was kind enough to check the morgue for me:
--
Bruce Allen Holbert, 22, Kent, was booked for second-degree manslaughter then released on PR.
Groomes, Holbert and a third unnamed man were sitting in a vehicle on Cemetery Road around 9:45 p.m. near Okanogan when Groomes was shot the back in what deputy prosecutor Mike Dempsey said was an accidental shooting.
It was left to prosecutor Doug Boole to decide to charge. Boole was on vacation.
Grooms was a student at Eastern Washington University studying criminology. He was spending the summer as a trainee with the Okanogan Police Department.
---
He notes that there is no Okanogan Police Department now. The town is covered by contract with the Okanogan County Sheriff's Office, which has its offices in town.
Which still leaves us with someone who can't describe the proper operation of the parts of a revolver, nor of the ignition system in a car. And who was seriously negligent with a handgun.
The only thing this moron killed was his integrity.
Still not buying it. You don't pull the hammer back on a revolver to check to see that the cylinder is empty. The only thing this story tells me is that you are an idiot handing your gun over to a leftist. You are even more of an idiot handing your Constitutional rights over to a Leftist because said Leftist killed a friend of his out of stupidity.
So the guy says he was at least "somewhat proficient"? If he didn't open the cylinder and unload the weapon before dong anything else he was not in any way "proficient". Neither was the fellow who handed him the weapon without unloading it first.
LEO deaths
1982. Two officers died in Washington State, one in King County and
one in Cle Ellum, WA. None died because of an inept journalist from the
Spokane area.
My contact at the Omak Chronicle just emailed that, to be clear, Groomes (the victim) was training with the Okanogan City PD, not the sheriff's office. But that's the kind of error I'd expect with normal human memory of events three decades ago, so it doesn't necessarily impeach the story.
But my teenage daughter caught the error in his gun handling right away.
"My friend was killed by a man who misunderstood guns, who imagined that comfort with — and affection for — guns was a vital component of manhood. I did not recognize a gun for what it was: a machine constructed for a purpose, one in which I had no real interest. I treated a tool as an essential part of my identity, and the result is a dead man and a grieving family and a survivor numbed by guilt whose story lacks anything resembling a proper ending."
This last paragraph is completely incongruous with the story. He says that the shooting occurred after being offered someone else's gun to examine. In this last paragraph, he says he treated the gun as a part of his identity? How could the gun of a stranger be treated as an essential part of his identity? I call total BS.
Actually, I had an MG 1100 back in the '60's, and it DID have a small oil reservoir in the carburetor that you had to keep topped up.
It sounds like he is (or at least could be) describing a single action revolver where one would in fact pull the hammer part way back to the "loading notch" to free the cylinder to spin so that the individual chambers can be inspected to see if they are empty or loaded.
He certainly mishandled the gun, and broke a couple of rules, but his story may be more correct than appears at first blush.
-bsd
I was taught that before you hand your weapon to someone else, make sure it is unloaded.
Isn't that basic gun safety?
I'm pretty sure that's the story he gave everyone; but that's as lame an excuse as anyone could dream up on meth...
So many errors relating to the operation of the firearm.
I'm no revolver guy, but in order for this STORY to work without the person in question putting his finger on the trigger, doesn't the "service" revolver (in 1982?) need to be single action? Otherwise wouldn't there be a transfer bar or something similar preventing this type of discharge. Feel free to correct me on this as I rarely shoot revolvers.
Long story short, my guess is that this guy had no idea what he was doing when his friend handed him his gun in a car while they were on the way to some county fair type thing (were they drinking?). The guy in question probably pulled the trigger twice on a loaded weapon relying on his thumb to arrest the fall of the hammer and completely ignoring muzzle discipline. It worked once. He feels badly about it (who wouldn't), and then turns around and blames the gun and not his own stupidity or lack of eduction. Tell me, if he had been out joy riding without a license in his dad's car and killed a kid, would he have blamed the car?
Outside the "Acela Corridor", I think the only take away from this story is that you should train your kids early to understand and respect firearms (and chainsaws and automobiles and kitchen knives and everything else dangerous). I hope NRA media picks up on this and puts the NY Times in their place.
Cheers.
I'm surprised he didn't 'check' to see if the chamber was clear by wrapping his mouth around the end of the barrel and blowing hard. If there is resistance to the air as you blow, the gun is chambered.
I bet the NY Times would buy this too.
Re Jacks and Bigskydoc
In his story he distinctly says "service revolver". I don't know of any police department that would use a single action revolver as late as 1982. I don't think very many police departments used revolvers at all by 1982. There is much about this story which simply doesn't make sense.
What scares me is that this fellow, who demonstrates such a dismal knowledge of firearms, says he owns three guns. Please Mr. Holbert get rid of those guns; you are not qualified to handle them.
When you cock the hammer on a revolver - any revolver (single or double action) - the cylinder rotates to the next chamber. Lowering the hammer doesn't do this. Letting the hammer fall simply brings the hammer down onto whatever is in that chamber. You'll either hear a click or a bang. The weapon was pointed to the right (on its side) and by cocking it (with his left hand, presumably) it flipped completely over to face the to the left? What? I don't see how that can happen no matter how much your grip slipped.
i am a friend of Doug Groom's parents and i can tell you that they were devastated by the death of their son -- which is something that most of the comments choose to ignore or skip by. Regardless of your views on the 2nd amendment, i find it sad that the comments ignore the death of a son.
Even if a single action, there's no need to cock hammer to "see if it's loaded"
Kevin - You're bothered by the comments here but not the shooter/author's exploiting the fact that he killed his friend?
Not proficient.
The author of that story is disrespecting the memory of the man he killed, by exploiting it in order to alter public opinion of firearms for the worse. But it will take a truly stupid public to be influenced by such an incoherent hash.
When he was a boy, my uncle accidentally shot and killed his best friend while fiddling with his father's gun from a box in the closet. I never heard him tell the story; others told me of it. He was TRULY riddled with guilt and could not even speak of it, let alone attempt to cynically use it to influence anyone's opinion.
@Harperman
Well into the late eighties I knew lawmen in South and West Texas that carried single action revolvers on patrol. I used to work for a small department in SE Alaska and at least as late as '96 the chief carried a Colt Python and could keep up with any of the officers who carried an assortment of semi-auto models.
So rare, but not unheard of. It would not surprise me that a small department in Eastern Washington could be similarly behind the times.
-bsd
Since when is a Colt Python a single-action revolver? Heck, even Wikipedia knows that it's a double-action.
Bigskydoc,
I know that lots of LEOs carried and still do carry revolvers if they are allowed to carry personal weapons. My father, a federal LEO carried a S&W 357 throughout his career. Like myself he preferred the accuracy of a revolver. I still have and shoot many of the guns he carried.
I did not know of any department that issued single action revolvers and I grew up around cops in many states. Still it wouldn't surprise me to know that some of the old timers preferred the single action revolvers they grew up with.
Kevin,
Nobody is ignoring the death of your friend. Nobody likes to hear of accidental death of any type. But we are shocked that the person who killed Doug through his own negligence, incompetence and ignorance would use Doug's memory to push an anti-gun rant.
Let's cut through the crap on this NY Times piece. The biggest problem with this story is that it doesn't add up from the perspective of what most of us gun "guys" know about firearm mechanics and operation. Now I certainly wasn't there and I haven't read the police report, but it seems to me that in order for victim to have been shot, the author would have had to be massively negligent. I truly wonder why (at 22) this guy was not charged with manslaughter or negligent homicide.
Let's translate this to a car situation (something probably everyone can understand). What the author was doing was the equivalent to driving 70 MPH on an ice covered road, and then, when he goes off the road at a well known hairpin turn and gets his friend killed, says "gee wiz, I'm sure I'm responsible but I'm not sure how that happened".
Unfortunately, most NY Times readers are not going to have the knowledge about firearms to spot the issue. This is, from my perspective at least, the most insidious part of the story, for while the author takes responsibility for the accident later in the piece, the writing of the paragraph shown above seems to allude to the proposition that the pistol fired without any intentional action on his part. This is clear Bullshit, but to the mind of the average NY Time reader it confirms their suspicions that firearms are not really inanimate objects (no one said the average NY Times reader was particularly bright or scientifically literate).
Now let's be very clear, the author says later in the piece that he was responsible and then lays some crap on about masculine gun culture (thereby triggering the "You Go Girl!!!" reflexive response of the average NY Times reader). This is a blatant attempt to show that it was his growing up in the disadvantaged rural culture (as opposed the being cooped up in a NYC apartment for his childhood) that was really to blame and not his negligence. To the average NY Time reader this is a rather effective sympathy ploy as the author is trying to say HE is the victim and not the guy that he shot. Go back to the car example for a second and ask yourself what your response to this OpEd would be. Mine would be: "WTF did you expect you F'ing moron". And if he claimed that he didn't know much about cars and driving when he took the wheel, I would reply "You are 22 years old. That shit would work if you hadn't made it to double digits, but not anymore."
BTW, I lived in NYC for 15 years and worked with you average over educated NY Times reader on a regular basis (I'm a bit over-educated myself) so I have a pretty good idea about what I'm talking about here.
Kevin: I'm not trying to diminish the death of your friend, but the author is clearly using this OpEd to both try to partially absolve himself from responsibility and advance a political point. If this guy were to show up in my town again, I'd make it a point to tell the author that he had 10 min to get out of town or there might be another accident.
BigSkyDoc: I understand that there may be old guys out there carrying single actions revolvers (particularly in AK where the bears and moose are probably a LEO's biggest threat). But this guy was a recruit and given the safety implications of single action carry (e.g., drop safe issues and lightness of trigger pull), I doubt that any dept would issue a single action in this circumstance.
The most basic piece of gun knowlege is to only point the muzzle in a safe direction, loaded or not. No one who knows gun safety would point the gun in a direction where an accidental discharge would shoot a person next to them, period. Gun safety would require that you are pointing the gun at a safe place toward the ground, or if outward, in a direction certain to not encounter people if a discharge occurs. That is the most basic gun safety. He can't claim to know gun safety and have accidentally killed anyone. The other basic is not to pick up a firearm if you have been drinking or are impaired in any way. One or both of these rules were broken.
Jack S hit the nail on the head here. Might as well close comments on this one
The most basic piece of gun knowlege is to only point the muzzle in a safe direction, loaded or not. No one who knows gun safety would point the gun in a direction where an accidental discharge would shoot a person next to them, period. Gun safety would require that you are pointing the gun at a safe place toward the ground, or if outward, in a direction certain to not encounter people if a discharge occurs. That is the most basic gun safety. He can't claim to know gun safety and have accidentally killed anyone. The other basic is not to pick up a firearm if you have been drinking or are impaired in any way. One or both of these rules were broken.
I should have been more clear. I didn't mean to imply that my long-time favorite double action revolver (lucky enough to own a few of them over the years) is single action.
I was responding to Robert's statement "I don't think very many police departments used revolvers at all by 1982" with a personal experience intended to show that, while they may not have been department issue, even into the mid-nineties revolvers were still carried as the primary duty weapon by some officers. I haven't seen a single action as a primary duty weapon since the eighties when I left Texas.
-bsd
This story is so nonsensical in so many ways. . . I wonder if the person actually did kill a friend in a pinto, or whether that memory is from the same memory as "skipping the ignition spark to fire the points".