I would submit that there are no accidental shootings while cleaning a gun. I do not see how that is possible. You’d have to be mentally impaired to not unload a gun before working it. All of those accidents are suicide IMO.
As a firefighter, I made calls on several self-inflicted gunshot wounds. They’re frequently listed as accidents when conditions suggest otherwise. Sometimes the family can’t accept that it was suicide.
It is interesting that you say that. I was wondering how an accidental death while cleaning could happen, myself. Where did the bullet land? I suppose it might be possible to clean a loaded gun and somehow, somehow, shoot yourself in the femoral artery region and bleed out before help could arrive, if you were alone, maybe no phone near by??
But if he shot himself in the head, he wasn’t cleaning.
And maybe she wanted his suicide to be private, so that was listed as the cause of death, like pneumonia often was for AIDS?
It wouldn’t shock me to know that her son committed suicide, but until I hear evidence to the contrary, I choose to believe the official findings...
The shotgun death of Mary Tyler Moore’s son, Richard, is the latest chapter in a chronicle of tragedy which has stalked the lives of the children of the stars.
Richard Meeker, Mary’s only child, was 24, employed by CBS-TV and living with a pair of college coeds when he killed himself with a shotgun with which one of his housemates said he was ‘playing, loading and unloading.’
During part of his mother’s successful TV career and her marriage to producer Grant Tinker, Richard lived in Fresno, Calif., with his father. He attended public school in Fresno for at least two years.
According to stepfather Tinker, ‘Richard was a happy, well-adjusted kid.’
Richard lived with two co-eds near the University of Southern California and according to one of them, Judy Vasquez, 21, was talking happily to his girlfriend in Fresno when the shotgun discharged.
One of Richard’s superiors at CBS, where he was a messenger, said he was a normal, well-adjusted young man, adding, ‘Nobody will ever make me believe his death was anything but an accident.’