In his post the day after Christmas, my colleague Tom Knighton gave some good advice to those who received a gun as a present. Know how to secure your firearm, learn the laws surrounding gun ownership, and find a good range where you can train. As Tom wrote, "[t]he last thing you need is a stray shot that misses an intruder and hits a family member, so go to the range and practice and practice until you're sick of it, then keep practicing."
Some of us are lucky to have places on our property where we can shoot safely without the need to drive to a range, but if you live in an urban or suburban setting that's probably not an option. And new gun owners may not understand why a proper backstop is so important, or even take into consideration what might lie beyond the target they're shooting at.
That appears to be the case in Comanche, Oklahoma, where a man is now facing manslaughter charges after his neighbor was fatally shot on Christmas day.
The New York Times, which rarely covers Oklahoma politics or crime, was eager to inform its readers about the tragedy.
An Oklahoma man was doing target practice on Thursday, Christmas Day, with a handgun he had bought himself when he fatally shot a woman who was sitting with two children on a neighboring front porch, the authorities said.
The man, Cody Wayne Adams, 33, was charged with first-degree manslaughter after the woman, who lived less than half a mile away, collapsed and died after she was shot once while sitting with family members in Comanche, Okla., about 96 miles southwest of Oklahoma City.
According to an affidavit, Sandra Phelps was sitting on the porch with family when they heard the sound of gunshots. Phelps remarked that someone had gotten a gun for Christmas, and moments later exclaimed "ouch" and collapsed. The affidavit notes that investigators found multiple homes in the area where people were enjoying a little holiday target practice, but all of them had “suitable shooting backstops or firing locations," with one exception.
Mr. Adams told investigators he had bought himself the gun as a Christmas gift a couple of days earlier and showed them a Red Bull energy drink can that he had been shooting at in his backyard.
From the vantage point of where Mr. Adams had been shooting, there was a clear line to where Ms. Phelps had been shot, the affidavit said. An investigator told Mr. Adams that he may have fatally shot Ms. Phelps and Mr. Adams became “visibly upset and began to cry.”
The Times report doesn't indicate if the handgun Adams was using was his first gun or if he'd previously shot at targets in the same location, but this isn't behavior we'd expect to see from someone with even a basic familiarity with firearms.
One of the first things we're taught as gun owners is to be sure of your backstop, to know what is behind whatever it is you're shooting at. But this isn't as self-evident as we'd like to think. There was a time not long after my family and I had moved to our farm when one of my older kids asked if he and a couple of friends could take one of my .22 rifles down to our shooting spot to plink at cans. A few minutes later he came back in the house to use the bathroom, but I could still hear the sound of gunshots from the kitchen, and they sounded closer than they should have been.
I went outside and saw one of his friends lying prone, shooting the .22 at a couple of cans he had set up on a very low berm behind my barn. This was not where we shoot on my property, and if his shots were even a little higher than intended, the bullets would have nothing but some trees to stop them before crossing over onto my neighbor's property.
The odds are he wouldn't have hit anything with a pulse, but I was still absolutely livid. Those of you who watch me on Bearing Arms Cam & Company know I'm a pretty easy going guy. It takes a lot to rile me up, but that day I was beside myself with anger; not only at him, or my son for leaving his friends unsupervised, but at myself as well. I didn't know this young man (my son and his friends were 19 or so at the time), but I did know my son, and I trusted him to impart the basic rules of gun safety to his friends when I should have done it myself.
Again, I don't know how much experience Mr. Adams has with firearms or how often he'd shot on his property before, but this doesn't sound like the behavior of someone who's spent much time at a range.
More gun control isn't the answer here. We shouldn't need a license to exercise a constitutional right, and in Oklahoma you don't need a license to legally keep or bear arms so long as you can lawfully own a gun. But even if a state doesn't mandate training, that doesn't mean training is a bad idea or unnecessary. In this case, even a single exposure to the basic rules of gun safety might have prevented Sandra Phelps from being killed on Christmas as she sat on her porch and enjoyed the sounds of those neighbors who were responsibly exercising their Second Amendment rights.
If you're going to buy a gun, don't assume you already know everything you need to be safe and responsible with it. There are basic rules of gun safety that must be followed in all circumstances:
- always treat your gun as if its loaded
- never point the muzzle in an unsafe direction
- be sure of your target and what's behind it
- keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to shoot
Chances are you're already well aware of these rules, but your family and friends might not be. We owe it to ourselves and others to impart this information whenever possible, even to non-gun owners, and especially to those who are new to gun ownership. It sounds like Sandra Phelps death was entirely preventable; not through a gun control statute, but with just a little common sense and working grasp on the fundamental rules of being safe with a firearm.
