How often do you read about guns in the news where the line “the gun went off…” or “The Gun Fired…” or other passive voice uses to give the illusion that guns simply fire on their own will, and they are horrifically dangerous.
I won’t go so far as to say dogs as a whole, or even any particular breed of dog is inherently dangerous, but as live animals they can indeed go off on their own:
olton police say a 2-year-old boy has been fatally mauled by as many as five dogs….Officers answering a call of a dog attack found the boy had been severely bitten on his upper body. He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Petty terrible, but hey, let’s just ban guns, because there’s nothing to see here!
There is a very good reason that guns “go off” of their own free will. Catch me in meatspace for an explanation.
My brother was mauled by a friend’s Akita when he was about 5 or 6 years old. Akitas are not known for being especially agressive, and my brother had been at this friend’s home often enough that the dog should have considered him part of the family. This Akita was bigger than the breed “standard,” rounder, shaggier, and pure black, so looking back I suspect he might have had some Newfoundland stock (also a docile breed). To this day – it’s been about *mumble mumble* years now – we don’t know why the dog attacked; we speculate he came up behind the dog and unintentionally “spooked” him, but that’s a guess.
In any case, a large dog versus a small kid. It’s a miracle he wasn’t hurt worse (all superficial, just a few stitches in a few places; more dirty than actually hurt).
Still, while a dog of any size can be “spooked” and attack out of a misdirected defensive instinct, an inanimate object like a firearm has no such instinct and cannot be “spooked” or surprised into “just going off.”