I saw a show that had a perp robbing a place with a gun - he knew it was a gun and that it was loaded. When he was sure there would be no resistance, he got careless and played with the gun a bit - it fired and hit the clerk. It was loose in his hand so it rotated back and the trigger reactivated as it was pointing at his own head. The store video shows a the prelude, then it is BANG-BANG, with clerk bleeding from his side and perp out of site and dead from blowing his own brains out.
When someone who doesn't have experience handling weapons, as I assume is the case with the "sock accident", I have no trouble picturing a dozen ways it could have gone bad.
You make a compelling point. Maybe I just need to watch Idiocracy again, to restore my faith in man’s stupidity. LOL. Sometimes I just forget that not everyone is as smart as the people in my little section of the world.