The careless stupidity of two people nearly led to a woman being killed in the parking lot of a gun show.

A woman was accidentally shot in the head on Saturday outside a gun show in Raleigh, according to authorities.

Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison said three people were inside a pickup truck around 10:15 a.m. outside the Dixie Gun and Knife Show at the N.C. State Fairgrounds when the shooting happened. The driver, identified as 30-year-old William Daniel Glosson, of Cameron, had just bought two guns from the show.

Glosson, who has a concealed-carry permit, handed one of the unloaded guns to Lasonya Judd, who was sitting in the back seat, and he also handed her a loaded gun he already had in the truck. As Judd was looking at the guns, she accidentally fired one, and the bullet struck Alyssa Lewis Glosson, 29, in the back of the head while she was sitting in the truck’s passenger seat.

What the story above doesn’t clearly communicate that was that one of the two handguns Mr. Glosson purchased was the same model of gun that he already carried, and instead of passing Judd the newly-purchased empty gun, he passed her his daily carry gun with a round in the chamber.

Judd, being an apparent neophyte—or maybe just as careless and reckless as Mr. Glosson— pointed the loaded gun in the direction of Mrs. Glosson’s head and pulled the trigger, with predictable results.

The rules of gun safety are there for a reason, folks.

All guns are always loaded.
If William Glosson had the apparently-not-so-common sense to remove the magazine, rack the slide and lock it back and then verify that the chamber was empty, then this incident couldn’t have occurred.

NEVER let he muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy.
Even if William Glosson was stupid enough to hand a loaded gun to Mrs. Judd (And he clearly was stupid enough to do just that), no one would have been in danger if the weapon was pointed in a safe direction. What did Mrs. Judd do? She pointed it at the head of her friend!

Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target.
Not only did Judd point the gun in the direction at her friend Alyssa Glosson’s head, she also pulled the trigger.

Always be sure of your target.
Judd was probably not consciously thinking about pointing the gun at Alyssa Glosson’s head, and if she was thinking about anything at all (and that is very much in doubt), she was probably aligning the sights with the seat rest, and gave little to no thought at all about Mrs. Glosson’s head being on the other side of it.

Mr. Glosson and Mrs. Judd broke all four rules of gun safety, and yet authorities are writing this off as an “accident.”

It was not an accident.

This was a display of gross negligence with a firearm by two people that nearly got a third person killed.

Be better than this, and never be careless around firearms.