Former Major League Baseball Most Valuable Player Jose Canseco—the first player to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in a season—is recovering from a negligent discharge:

Former major league slugger Jose Canseco is recovering after shooting himself in the hand at his Las Vegas home.

Metro police Lt. Mark Reddon says officers responded to a call of an accidental shooting shortly after 2:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Reddon says Canseco told police he was cleaning his gun in the kitchen when it fired, shooting a finger on his left hand. He was taken to University Medical Center of Southern Nevada.

Canseco’s fiancee, Leila Knight, tweeted from his account late Tuesday night, saying he was still in surgery and would be OK.

October has traditionally been a sort of unofficial “negligent discharge month” because of careless or neophyte hunters treating firearms carelessly in the field, and we’ve had examples of that sort of negligent discharge in Butte, Montana and northwest Iowa this week.

For some reason, however, we’ve also seem to have had a rash of negligent discharges at ranges and at homes with people either cleaning of holstering weapons, and it’s no laughing matter; a probation officer died Monday after shooting himself in the groin, striking a major artery and bleeding out.

In each and every one of these incidents, without fail, the person handling the firearm violated at least two of the four rules.

It’s blindingly obvious in retrospect that Canseco—like dozens of people every year—failed to remove the magazine from his weapon and do a thorough chamber check the One Correct Way (physically putting your finger in the chamber to verify it is not occupied by a cartridge) before proceeding with the disassembly of his pistol.

I somewhat suspect that Canseco was attempting to disassemble one of those plastic pistols that requires the trigger to be pulled before disassembly.

“Perfection,” my skinny white butt.