Utah police have a novel case on their hands after a man shot a toilet at the Carl’s Jr. restaurant in Centerville, Utah. The man was in the men’s room and was pulling up his pants when his concealed handgun discharged — shooting the toilet, wounding himself, and sending a woman in a nearby Ladies Room to the hospital.
The man entering the Men’s Room packing a .40-caliber Kahr P40 handgun with a valid concealed weapon. When he pulled his pants up, the gun fell to the ground and discharged — wounding the man with shrapnel and scaring a woman nearby. The woman was taken to the hospital with chest pains.
In a negligence case, the woman could certainly show negligent conduct, but would then have to show that the negligent act was the legal or proximate cause of the injury. Under a more restrictive Wagon Mound jurisdiction, the change of harm from a bullet to noise would make it a novel case. In most jurisdictions, such an injury to the woman would be treated as foreseeable harm.
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@rafflaw: expect this guy to lose his permit. At least in my state (CO), it’s a Shall-Issue permit, meaning they give it to you unless they have a reason not to…and being an idiot on record is “a reason not to.” Innocent until proven guilty. They can revoke it for something as trivial as failing to register a dog or jay walking, if they want to.
@Big Fella: “what idiot walks around with a live round chambered in his pistol[?]”
Anyone who knows what they are doing, both police and civilian. I’ve carried revolvers and autoloaders without incident, ALWAYS with a full mag and one in the chamber…or all cylinders of a revolver loaded. If you know how to operate your quality firearm and have a proper holster, you will never, ever have an accidental discharge.
And if you’re not a cop and you *need* a gun, you need it NOW NOW NOW! Racking the slide takes time that could leave you dead and give the bad guy a new gun.
This guy obviously did not have a pocket holster…the ONLY way this gun could have gone off was something catching the trigger. It’s a Double Action Only pistol, so it takes a bit of force to pull the trigger. Dropping a decent gun like a Kahr would not cause it to discharge. Something pulled the trigger. Nail this guy for being a dumbass, I say as a RESPONSIBLE carry permitee.
Buddha:
You plagiarized that line from Robert Penn Warren’s classic “All the King’s Men.” Here’s what Warren says the toilet said just before the calamity:
“You don’t know how much I know or what. I was thick with the Boss and I know a lot. I’m the joker in the deck. My name is J[ohn] and I’m the wild j[ohn] and I’m not one-eyed. You want to deal me to yourself from the bottom of the deck. But it’s no sale, Tiny, it’s no sale.”
So you see this was no accident but a bathroom card game gone awry.
I saw that movie, Snake on a Toilet.
I would hope this story puts to rest forever that hoary adage that “fortune favors the bowl.”
It was a dark and stormy night. Someone screamed, “I don’t have to take that kinda crap off of you!” A shot rang out. A woman screamed. There the victim lay, shattered and broken, the King dethroned.
I am against concealed handguns and this case is one of the reasons why. This moron carrying the gun in his pants was lucky he didn’t hurt someone else more seriously or hurt himself more seriously. Aren’t these weapons supposed to be locked when not in use so they cannot go off? Do the concealed weapons licensing laws allow for a retraction of the license when the gun owner has shown his/her incapacity to carry it properly and safely?
OK, so I just checked it out, the Kahr P40 is a semi-automatic pistol with ammunition fed from a clip in the grip. So I ask again, what idiot walks around with a live round chambered in his pistol, is he some kind of quick draw artist? I hope he carries liability insurance, not for his sake, for the sake of the woman who was injured.
Why is it that the knucklehead gun owners (I am not calling out all gun owners) seem to always injure or kill someone else, and not themselves, so that at least Mother Nature could weed out the intellectually deficient life forms.
I do not know the applicable law, but the law of common sense would tell me, if I was a judge or jury making a decision on this case, I would want to know if the gun he was carrying was an automatic, and if so, why would he walk around with a bullet chambered, instead of all bullets in the clip. Recalling my days as a “rent a cop” during my aborted college career many many moons ago, when I did carry a weapon, it was a revolver, with six chambers, and I always had one chamber empty, and that was the chamber lined up in front of the hammer, you know, just in case.