Woman confuses mini-revolver for lighter, shoots daughter
Posted on August 17, 2011 at 5:29pm
KESQ News in California is reporting that a woman accidentally shot her 12-year old daughter in the arm by mistaking a tiny NAA mini-revolver with a gun-shaped cigarette lighter.
Police today were trying to figure out how a .22-caliber revolver wound up on the ground outside a Banning mobile home, where a woman mistook it for a cigarette lighter and accidentally fired it, wounding her 12- year-old daughter.
The girl's mother, 30-year-old Rachel Avila, and her daughter were talking with friends when Avila spotted what she thought was a gun-shaped cigarette lighter on the ground, picked it up and pulled the trigger to light it, Diaz said. The weapon discharged, firing a bullet that ricocheted off the ground and into her daughter's upper arm, he said.
For comparison, here is a NAA mini-revolver:
And a revolver-shaped lighter:
Luckily for everyone involved, the girl was treated and released from the ER with mostly superficial wounds. It looks like we'll have to amend the first firearms safety rule — "Treat all guns, and all objects that look like guns, as if they are loaded at all times, even after confirming for yourself that it is not loaded.
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