On October 24, an Indiana woman was shot in the foot by her dog, Trigger. A conservation officer reported that Allie Carter, 25, was hunting waterfowl and put her 12-gauge shotgun on the ground with the safety off, after which Trigger stepped on the gun, pulling the, uh, trigger. The shooting is being treated as an accident.
Surprisingly, this sort of thing happens a lot.
Last year, Richard Fipps, a 45-year-old man from Wyoming, was injured in a similar incident. Fipps had a gun in the backseat of his car that accidentally discharged in the shuffle of his dog moving up to sit closer to him.
According to a report from the Washington Post, there have been ten instances of a dog accidentally shooting a person since 2004. Many of them are hunting accidents, and the others can be attributed to the sheer number of guns owned by Americans. U.S. citizens account for more than half of private gun ownership worldwide, so it’s understandable that we have more hardware for more dogs to trip over.
To date, none of the shootings can be reliably attributed to malice in their furry little hearts … except maybe this one.
