Experts Find Glocks Prone To Accidents

When a Syracuse man was struck last week by a bullet fired through the ceiling of his apartment, it marked the third time in eight years that an Onondaga County probation officer had unintentionally discharged one of the department-issued Glock pistols.

Those three incidents, and similar cases in Central New York and elsewhere, come as no surprise to Joseph Cominolli. Cominolli was a Syracuse police sergeant in 1987 when he was assigned to find the best semiautomatic handgun to replace that department's revolvers.

The hot new Glock pistol that other police agencies were then buying had two drawbacks that caused Cominolli to reject it. The Glock had no manual safety switch and no magazine safety that made the gun inoperable when the magazine was removed.

A Glock is a safe weapon, Cominolli said, but only if the person handling it knows how to use it. If the gun is unloaded in the wrong order, for example, a round of ammunition can be left in the chamber without the user realizing it, he said. With no manual safety, the gun will fire if the trigger is pulled.

"Even with good training, people forget," he said. "And guns are not forgiving."

On July 30, Stacey Nunn, a probation officer for about a year, was unloading her .40-caliber Glock when it fired into the floor of her second-story apartment at 1904 James St. The bullet struck her downstairs neighbor, Michael Chapman, in the chest as he was making dinner in his kitchen. Chapman's condition improved from critical to serious this week at University Hospital.

Nunn had removed the magazine from the gun before the weapon fired, according to police.

In 1994, probation officer Susan Beebe shot herself in the knee while unloading her Glock. In September 1998, a firearms instructor for the probation department unintentionally fired his Glock into a wall while teaching a class how to remove the weapon from a holster. The shot put a hole through a classroom wall at the Elbridge Rod and Gun Club.

The gun's inadvertent firing in the hands of a gun expert caused concern, Probation Commissioner Robert Czaplicki said.

"We took a look at what went on," Czaplicki said. "We had a group of people look at it. It raised some red flags."

The firearms instructor is still teaching probation officers, said Czaplicki, who would not identify the instructor.

Cominolli, who is retired from the police, has designed and patented a manual safety device that can be added to Glock pistols. Last year, he talked to Czaplicki about adding the device to the probation department's guns.

Czaplicki said the county then talked with Glock officials about having the device installed. But the county rejected the idea after Glock said it would void the warranty on the guns if the safeties were added, Czaplicki said.

Czaplicki said his department is reconsidering the safeties in light of last week's unintentional discharge that injured Chapman.

Cominolli said he knows of dozens of "unintentional discharges" of Glocks in Central New York over the past 15 years, and estimates there have been thousands across the country. He won't refer to them as accidents because that implies the shootings could not have been prevented.

No national statistics are available on which manufacturer's handgun has the most unintentional firings. The Washington Post reported in 1998 that District of Columbia officers, who use Glock 9mm handguns, unintentionally fired their weapons more than 120 times over 10 years.

In 1988, the FBI issued a report on Glock handguns giving them low marks, citing a "high potential for unintentional shots," according to the Post. The agency will not release the report, according to an FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C.

Last week, a Queens corrections officer fatally shot his son while the officer was unloading his 9mm Glock handgun in his home, according to Newsday. A police chief in Coral Gables, Fla., accidentally fired his .40-caliber Glock last month into his locker at a health club, according to The Miami Herald.

The Onondaga County Sheriff's Department, which has used Glocks since 1992, has had at least three unintentional discharges with the weapon, according to Lt. Thomas Morehouse, a firearms instructor. A deputy fired a shot that grazed his hand in 1992. A detective fired a round into the floor of his patrol car a few years ago. And a deputy accidentally pulled the trigger three years ago and fired a round into the ground at the training range, Morehouse said.

In December, an Oswego County sheriff's deputy accidentally fired his Glock handgun into the foot of a security officer at a nuclear power plant.

Cominolli, a nationally known firearms expert, said he's gotten dozens of calls from lawyers representing police officers who'd shot themselves with Glocks. He tells them he's never heard of a case of the gun malfunctioning. It's always operator error, he said.

That's why he designed the safety device and is marketing it to police agencies and private gun owners across the country. With the safety on, the trigger bar inside the gun can't move.

"If you have a brain fade and pull the trigger, it won't go bang," Cominolli said.

Newly hired probation officers in Onondaga County must carry a firearm after undergoing 35 hours of training on the shooting range and 14 hours in the classroom, Czaplicki said. Veteran officers in the department have the option of carrying a gun. Probation officers are trained by the department's two state-certified firearms instructors, he said. Forty-one of the county's 84 probation officers now carry a gun on the job. All carry Glocks.

In response to last week's shooting, the department is reviewing its training procedures, Czaplicki said. He wouldn't comment on details of the shooting, except to say it's certain that the trigger on the gun must have been pulled. Initial police reports erroneously said the gun had fired when the officer dropped it.

Mark Doneburgh, Glock's district manager for the Syracuse area, was an Onondaga County sheriff's deputy 14 years ago when he first looked at Glocks. He questioned whether they could hold up because they're made of plastic, so he took the gun up in a helicopter and dropped it to the ground. It didn't break and didn't fire, he said.

Glock doesn't fit its guns with manual safety switches because the guns have three internal "passive" safeties, Doneburgh said. Those safeties automatically disengage when someone pulls the trigger, but they prevent the gun from firing when it's dropped or when the trigger gets bumped from the side.

Glocks are popular with police because the revolvers they replaced had no manual safeties, he said. The fear was that officers would have trouble getting used to having to turn off the safety in a gunfight, Doneburgh said. He studied the Glock for the sheriff's department.

"We needed a gun that we could easily transition my people with and that they could feel confident with," he said. "It's a draw, point and shoot gun."

Onondaga County Corrections Commissioner Timothy Cowin said he would not outfit his officers with Glocks until they were fitted with Cominolli's manual safety last year.

"I've been in this business a long time, and I can tell you there are many, many accidental discharges that never get reported," Cowin said. "When people are holstering or drawing that weapon, they automatically put their finger in that trigger guard without even thinking about it."

With training, officers not accustomed to turning off a manual safety can make it a habit, Cowin said.

Cowin said it's unclear whether the added safety means Glock will no longer honor its warranty. He said he decided to make the change anyway because the weapon is unlikely to need any repairs that the correction department's own armorer can't fix.

Many accidental Glock discharges involve unloading. Doneburgh, who teaches gun safety courses at Onondaga Community College, said he always demanded perfection from his police recruits when they unloaded guns during firearms training.

"I used to tell them, No. 1, 'mag' out," he said of the need to remove the magazine before clearing the chamber. "I told them, 'Put your finger on the trigger and I'm going to take a knife and cut it off.' And they believed me. Hopefully, that's going to stay with them for 20 years."

Glock doesn't fit its guns with safeties because many police officers are used to not having to switch them off and because the company has never been found liable for any unintentional shooting, Doneburgh said.

"We've never lost a lawsuit," he said. Doneburgh said he didn't know how many lawsuits the company had settled, and a lawyer for Glock could not be reached for comment.

Cominolli said he's sold between 600 to 800 of the safeties to police agencies and private gun owners in the first year and has orders for more. He charges $75 a gun for law enforcement agencies. Local Glock owners can buy the device at Ra-Lin Discount in Syracuse.

The Kenmore Police Department, near Buffalo, wouldn't have bought Glocks without the added safeties, Cominolli said.

Twelve of the 17 police departments in Onondaga County, including the sheriff's department and state police, issue Glocks to their officers. The only ones that don't are Syracuse, DeWitt, Baldwinsville, North Syracuse and East Syracuse, Doneburgh said.

DeWitt police Capt. Bruce Wahl said he chose the Smith & Wesson semiautomatic partly because it has a manual safety and another safety that makes the gun inoperable without the magazine. Officials at other police agencies, such as Camillus, said they've never had an unintentional firing of a Glock.

"The Glock is accepted by 70 percent of law enforcement agencies in North America," Doneburgh said.

He said he's heard reports of a Glock being unintentionally fired, and each time it's because someone messed up; the gun itself has never malfunctioned.

"We're in a society where we're making inanimate objects responsible for our stupidity," he said. "You have to put warnings on things. You can't put your dog in a microwave oven to dry him. Common sense has to take over here."

Treat all guns as if they are loaded at all times. Never pull the trigger unless you intend to shoot something

No. *All guns are always loaded.* *Keep your finger off the trigger until the sights are aligned with that which you intend to shoot.*

Gunsmoke

Number 3
"Sorrows"
for August 1997.

In the play Hamlet, [H.IV:5] William Shakespeare tells us that "When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but battalions". Though written in a day when swords were the most common personal armament, he could easily have been writing about accidental discharges from firearms- particularly automatic weapons. For all the sorrow they cause, they can't be reversed, only remembered, and the only good that can come of them is the lesson that they teach their survivors not to repeat them.

There's nothing new about them. It's even possible that the very first discharge of the first firearm may have not been as intended: since the early Chinese fireworks bombs loaded with black powder in bamboo shattered their containers spectacularly, experimenting handloaders seeking magnum effects needed only to reinforce the bamboo tube with cord or wire wrapping and additionally plug the end joints with rocks or plugs cemented in place with dried mud or mortar. When one end plug, tamped or wadded less effectively than those at the other end flew out with lethal force, some bright tinkerer may next have had the idea of doing so intentionally- particularly if that first flying projectile struck some forgotten bystander with lethal force. We've come a long way since then, but accidents will happen.

There's even some comment that those "accidental discharges" should be termed "unintentional discharges" or "nondirected discharges" in that those terms make the sickening thought of what might have been somehow less horrible.

So I'm happy that though I've been around a few of them, I've never had one. It might be that the thought of an unwanted discharge from an automatic weapon capable of twenty shots, more or less, in a second or two, whether a single round or a repetitious rattleburst, is a sufficiently scary thought as to inspire safer gun handling. It may be that the auto weapon hopefully reaches the hands of an operator who has worked their way through a progression of successively complicated weapons. It may just be that there are comparatively fewer lead-spreading fire-breathing sprayguns looking for a handler who will have an accident with them. But whether one shot or a string of them results, whether injury or damage results, they're a bad thing.

Though no comparison should be made of the deaths or injuries that have resulted from such discharges should be attempted, a record expense for material damage to government property not involving human injury was recorded a few years before the adoption of the Beretta M9 pistol by a bored guard with an M1911A1. At a remote airfield in Greenland, the aircraft and hangers of one USAF Weather Reconnaissance Squadron were under guard as top-secret gear, since those planes would overfly the remains of areas targeted following nuclear exchanges in the event of global conflict.

Accordingly, one lonely guard was left to entertain himself over a repeated four-hour shift with no other entertainment that his .45, the reading of books and magazines while on the duty having been forbidden as "distracting" and punished with Article 15 proceedings. So the lonely guard instead equipped himself with an extra magazine of dummy ammunition and practiced his fast-draw techniques from the GI holster (it can be done pretty fast, with enough practice.) Eventually, it happened.

The gun was pulled in a blur, the hammer dropped and the round in the chamber fired. The good news was: no one was hurt. That was not the only news. After clearing his pistol, the shaken guard began to wonder where the slug had gone. After a short search, he found a neat half-inch diameter hole in one of the hanger's twin doors. Glancing outside, he noted that on the exit side the sheet metal had peeled back like a banana peel, and with a little work, some putty and paint, it was possible that no one would ever know.

He found an unlocked toolbox with a hammer and neatly rearranged the exit hole into its earlier configuration. Some caulking and gray paint took care of the rest, and a "NO SMOKING" sign on the inside of the door, moved just a few inches, covered the trail of the .45 slug even better.

But during his work on the exterior side, he had noticed a plane parked outside the hanger that hadn't been there before. Though there was no crew around to have heard the shot, there was an airfield tow tractor hooked to the plane, and it might be that a deal would have to be made with some sympathetic ramp-rat.

He threw on his parka and went outside, to find an enormous radar/electronics pod under the wing facing the hanger. Fearing the worse, he checked the multimillion dollar accessory for a bullet hole, but thankfully it was clean. He checked for the tow operator, but he had fled for the comfort of a warm barracks or mess hall. As he started back for the hanger he happened to glance at the big pod, now nearly touching the ground as the air leaked out of the port side landing gear's tires, and he finally figured out where his .45 slug went.

A funny story? Sure, and I laughed too when a now-retired small arms facility director told it as a part of a safety training lecture. I didn't laugh nearly as much when I heard about DEA Special Agent Bob Lightfoot, who was 34 when he died as a result of a firearms accident on November 23, 1977 in Bangkok, Thailand. So many DEA agents have died in the line of duty, in plane crashes, during an office collapse, from hostile fire- and of course in the Oklahoma City bombing (where they were on duty in their office that day, unlike the ATF staffers who had been told not to come in that morning). They don't need any additional fatalities from improper or unsafe firearms handling. But it has happened.

DEA has lost and will lose too many good people in the hazardous course of their job to lose any more to such accidents; I hope Special Agent Lightfoot is the very last one. But of course, it's more probable that he won't be. Neither are those accidents limited to the DEA: back when Henry Kissinger was still the Secretary of State, there was an accidental discharge of an Uzi aboard the Secretary's plane, though the Uzi is about as fool-and-soldier-proof as weapons can get.

More recently, on 28 July of this year, international wire services reported that a security agent for current Secretary of State Madeline Albright shot himself in the foot "while checking his weapon", according to a State Department spokesman. The accident occurred at the Sunway Lagoon Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, where the agent was quartered on the same floor as the Madame Secretary- who was reportedly not injured during the incident.

And while the BATF blacksuits charging into the church at Waco, Texas seem to have managed some accidental shots during that action, those BATF agents who died that day appear to have suffered from deliberate execution from behind rather than unaimed stray fire. That's a tradition too, in a way: that agency which claims to be the descendent of Chicago T-Man Elliot Ness and his prohibition-era rumrunner-busters neglects to mention the more than 2000 innocent bystanders and unarmed suspects shot by the T-men during the Prohibition days. Perhaps it's a tradition that they have to shoot somebody, even if it's each other.

Of course, County and local lawmen are no more exempt from those unwanted events than their federal cousins. One Indiana sheriff's department had the "special weapons" out for inspection one day, with preloaded magazines present. Now at that time, the M1 carbine could be found in the department's cars, and the semiautomatic Remington M11 shotgun was the local choice of backup firepower carried in the patrol cars. Both of these fire from a closed bolt, as do most of the .22 semiautomatics with which the deputies were familiar and the semiauto shotguns with which a few of them may have hunted.

So a too-unfamiliar operator placed a loaded box magazine in his department's M1928A1 Thompson, with the selector switch in the "semi" position and the safety in the "fire" position. The bolt handle was pulled to the rear, as is necessary when chambering a first round in a closed-bolt weapon like a carbine or semiauto shotgun- but the Thompson fires from the open bolt. The weapon's bolt seemed stuck to the rear. Perhaps, he reasoned, there was a magic button or switch to release the bolt, like the carrier release on those auto shotguns. He turned the safety to "safe"- and nothing happened. He turned the other knob (the selector switch) to "full-auto"- and nothing happened. He turned the safety back again- to "fire"- and again, nothing happened... and then he touched the trigger. The good news was: neither he nor anyone else was hurt. The bad news was that he was in the radio room.

But it shouldn't be thought that the Thompson is unsafe in any sense. The safety of the Thompson blocks it's sear, which thereby keeps the bolt securely in the closed position when that bolt is in the forward position, safety on safe. Similarly, the safety of the M3 and M3A1 grease guns that replaced the Thompson also locks the open-bolt firing grease gun's breech either to the rear ready for firing, or in the forward position, ready to be cocked. That's an improvement over other similar weaponry of other major WW2 powers, which were notorious for accidental firings, particularly when dropped or suddenly jarred.

The German MP38 was so prone to such discharges that an improved bolt handle was designed, added to later production guns [thence known as MP38/40] and retrofitted to the older weapons. With a loaded magazine in place, rearward bump of the gun could cause the bolt's inertia to return the bolt against its recoil springs sufficiently for the magazine to feed a cartridge to the chamber, but not so far back as to catch the bolt against the sear. When the spring then returned the bolt to its forward position, the gun fired that waiting cartridge, usually then returning to the fully cocked position, but of course by then the damage had already been done. All too often it was to a nearby bystander, but with the neat folding stock of the German MP, it was quite possible for the gun's operator to be pointing it beneath his chin. The British were no better equipped with the various Marks of Sten Guns, though a latching bolt handle also appeared on some, but not all of that weapon's nearly three million examples.

Accidents with the Sten in the postwar period were common enough that the British progressed with the design of the Sterling SMG from the wartime Patchett design; Israeli inventor Uziel Gal, taking a different approach, incorporated a grip safety on the gun that was to replace the Sten in his nation's military services, and other postwar guns such as the Madsen and Beretta M12 also shared that safety feature.

Later Uzi production included a ratchet to catch and lock the bolt if the cocking handle slipped in a wet or tired hand while loading the gun. It's often been thought that Marines using the .45 Reising M50 SMG during the Second World War disdained it because less than perfect interchangeability of parts rendered the gun less than reliable, but conversations with former Marine Raiders who carried the gun, as well as at least two knowledgeable police officers very familiar with the Reising in their respective but widely separated jurisdictions offer another reason too: the cocking knob located beneath the barrel forward of the magazine invited an operator's habit of turning the gun upside-down during the charging process, in which position the gun could easily be pointed at one's foot. This is an undesirable attribute for an infantryman's weapon, and was also not especially to be wanted for a flatfoot law enforcement officer in a day when semiautomatic pistols were thought to be too complicated for most cops to safely operate.

The Reising, of course, was a closed-bolt gun, so those who think that it's the open-bolt slam-firing mechanism of some other automatic weapon's design that's at fault may take no comfort from those events, nor from a more recent one.

A qualified shooter and gunsmith of the Memphis Police Department was adjusting the sights of a MP5 submachinegun when his hand passed before the muzzle of the weapon as he fired, with a round striking his finger. Investigated by that department's Security Squad, he was given a reprimand, and presumably, some first aid. But Wait!- that has nothing to do with the internal function of the gun, no matter how it's bolt functions. That sort of thing can happen- and has- with almost any weapon open bolt or closed, fully automatic, semi or single shot.

Exactly. It can. And it has. Don't do that with your hand, or anyone else's, or to the tires of an aircraft carrying a multimillion dollar radar pod waiting to be crushed, or to a pal in the back of a pickup. Don't do it to the roof of the range shack, or your car, or to the ceiling of your living room or den. It's unsettling, sets a bad example, and wastes ammunition. There is a safety device which can help prevent some such accidents, though not all.

It's the one between your ears. It's the one that remembers The Four Rules and lives by them, and insists on their consideration from others. The gun is no more or less safe than the person behind it, though some mechanical features require more understanding than others. Some people will never understand or accept any mechanical safety device, and for some none is necessary. And some users would never need to know because they're only going to have one accident anyway, and it will be the last one. The angels know their names and their mistakes; I don't.

Use that safety between your ears. It's the only one you can count on.

THE FOUR RULES:

*All firearms are loaded. - There are no exceptions. Don't pretend that this is true. Know that it is and handle all firearms accordingly. Do not believe it when someone says: "It isn't loaded."

*Never let the muzzle of a firearm point at anything you are not willing to destroy. - If you would not want to see a bullet hole in it do not allow a firearm's muzzle to point at it.

*Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target. - Danger abounds if you keep your finger on the trigger when you are not about to shoot. Speed is not gained by prematurely placing your finger on the trigger as bringing a firearm to bear on a target takes more time than it takes to move your finger to the trigger.

*Be sure of your target and what is behind it. - Never shoot at sounds or a target you cannot positively identify. Know what is in line with the target and what is behind it (bullets are designed to go through things). Be aware of your surroundings whether on a range, in the woods, or in a potentially lethal conflict.

-30-

-archy-/-

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