Woman confuses mini-revolver for lighter, shoots daughter
Posted on August 17, 2011 at 5:29pm
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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.

From KESQ.com:

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:

NAA mini-revolver

And a revolver-shaped lighter:

Revolver 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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