Robiland, it's not so much just checking to make sure your safety is on. It's NEVER laying your gun down when it's loaded period!
We are all taught this in Hunter's Safety and I actually learned this lesson the hard way myself.
This story was way to close to home for me and I didn't find it funny one bit.
My Bro-In-Law and I were out hunting ducks about 10 years ago on the Rainbow unit. We had a slow day, middle of the week, not another sould in the area. We were a good half mile out into the marsh.
We decided to call it a day so we put the safeties on our guns and lay them on a pile of toolies facing away from us, like we had done a 100 times before. Bro goes out and starts throwing decoys into me and I am placing them in the bag. Dog is running around having a good ole time. Bro comes back into the blind and we are finishing up when I hear a shot go off.
Scares the heck out of me and I look at my Bro like, "What the heck are you shooting for?" and he is giving me the same look.
I look down and my decoy bag is smoking. As reality starts to settle in I realize it's smoking because it was shot. As I look further the shot had gone right between my legs right about mid-thigh height with my waders on. I didn't even feel it! The hole on the close side of the decoy bag was about 1" in diameter and the hole on the far side of the decoy bag was about 6" in diameter.
My Bro was standing about a foot behind me and just to my side so he felt the percussion right across his lap. Well, what the hell just happened?
We start looking at the gun to see what happened and right away we can see the dog's paw print on the area around the safety and the trigger. The dog had jumped up on the Toolies, stepped on the trigger guard releasing the safety and as he stepped it turned the gun towards us and when he pushed off it pulled the trigger.
If that gun would have been 2' farther back or 2" to either side or 5 inches higher I would have lost a large part of my legs. Knowing there is a pretty good artery running down your leg and realizing we are a half a mile out in the muck and mud made us realize that we may not have made it out of there before bleeding to death in the marsh.
Well, needless to say, we were both very shaken. Shken to the point that I kneeled down righ there in the marsh and started to flat out weep.
It was a long and quite wlak out and ride home and to this day I get the chills when I think about or talk about the incident.
I still have the decoy and the decoy bag with the evidence of the incident and it serves as an excellent reminder to me and those I know to never leave your gun unattended when it is loaded. When you are going to set your gun down for any reason, UNLOAD IT!
I am very glad this guy is OK and I can only imagine how this was for him.
Anyway, just thought I would share
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