NEWS AND OPINION: Yes, this man’s best friend shot him dead. Of course, it was an accident but what an accident! The ultimate kind of accident. And this has happened before. In this instance, Joseph Smith, 30, was sitting in the front passenger seat of a pickup truck.
The sheriff said that a dog belonging to the pickup truck owner was on the back seat where there was hunting gear and a rifle. The dog stepped on the rifle causing it to discharge a bullet forwards into the front seat where it struck Joseph Smith who apparently died on the spot.
The owner of the vehicle has not been disclosed. We don’t know what happened to the dog. Joseph Smith’s former colleagues started a Go Fund Me donation page to pay for his funeral expenses which has raised $10,000. Apparently, Mr Smith with a plumber and his plumbing friends are helping.
One of Mr Smith’s colleagues, Jessica, said that he was a “truly amazing man. He was kind, funny, smart and very loving. Every time he walked through the door, he would make someone smile.”
Shame then that he was a sport hunter, killing animals for fun. I don’t think anybody can be amazing if they kill animals for fun. But this is a culture thing and I don’t get it. You have to be raised within a family who sport hunt to get it, to enjoy it and see nothing at all wrong with it.
Regrettably, Smith isn’t the first American to be accidentally shot by a dog. Clearly the cause is due to gun owning people being careless about where they put their weapons. There have been many instances too of children in back seats shooting their parents in the front seats because they left the firearm on the back seat for their child to play with.
Sonny Gilligan, 74, said that he was driving on a hunting trip in New Mexico in 2018 when he was shot by his dog in the back. Clearly, he survived to tell the tale. The dog stepped on a rifle which looks like a very similar scenario to the way Joseph Smith was killed.
In the United States, the Pew Research Centre reports that in 2020 (the most recent figures available) there were 535 accidental (unintentional) human deaths by firearms.
How do people become careless about where they put their guns and how they handle them? It must be to do with normalising weapons. There are so many of them and they are so ubiquitous that users temporally forget that they are lethal.
Below are some more articles on sport hunting. As you can guess, like many other people, I hate sport hunting because I love animals and hate people who shoot animals for fun. That seems like common sense to me but correct me if you think I’m wrong. You really have to see animals as sentient beings with feelings and equal rights compared to seeing them as “just animals” with humans having dominion over them to use the words of the Bible.
I don’t want to sound mean and nasty because I’m sympathetic towards Mr Smith but you might argue that this is an example of karma. If you go around shooting animals for entertainment and you take your dog with you this sort of accident might happen. Mr Smith is the author of his own demise.
