They’re Always Loaded

Back in college, we had a scene with a pistol.  We used a starter pistol; the chamber held only caps, and the barrel didn’t even have a hole for a bullet in it.  And still, the professor/director insisted that, on stage, we  never point it directly at anyone.  “They’re always loaded”.

Which is a familiar notion to anyone that’s taken a gun safety close.

And – you’d think – to a French marine.  But apparently not.

French sergeant accidentally shoots 17 at a hostage-rescue demonstration:

The sergeant opened up with an assault rifle, firing live rounds instead of blanks into a crowd of hundreds of visitors watching a hostage-taking exercise Sunday at the base near the southwestern city of Carcassonne.

A man who witnessed the shooting told AFP that “suddenly, people were falling, we thought it was part of the exercise, and then we saw blood.”

The sergeant was playing a terrorist in a show being put on for a crowd.

A senior army officer insisted that the incident was almost certainly the result of an “unintentional” error.Fifteen civilians were among those injured, including the three-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl who were both operated on overnight and were described Monday as being in a stable condition.

…The use of the live rounds was “99.9 percent” likely to be “an unintentional fault,” said Colonel Benoit Royal, the head of the French army’s information service.

Hope everyone recovers.

Wonder if Nancy Pelosi will try to blame this on Heller?

9 thoughts on “They’re Always Loaded

  1. The French need to disarm the army. It’s the only way the people will be safe.

  2. No, Pelosi will blame it on an “obsession with terrorism” when terrorism doesn’t exist. Or she’ll say that it wouldn’t have happened if Bush hadn’t lied.

  3. What NW says, but also the fact that there are a bunch of people just wounded probably speaks to the quality of their training. Praise God nobody is dead, but ordinarily if you end up with live ammo in such an exercise, with some “innocents” and “guilty” injured, you’ve failed to train the team to do things right.

    Praise God they did things wrong in the shooting. Who the **** let live ammo in there? Why on earth are they doing this play-acting for an audience?

  4. Isn’t there a saying about Hell having a French military, etc.? Something like that…

  5. .While I think that the RKBA is a human right, I’m willing to be reasonable, and flexible, and exclude the French.

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