One of those days, I think it was when my oldest daughter was about six and at that time, she was shooting with us, she had her own firearm by that age. My youngest daughter hadn’t been with us on that trip. I went out shooting with my father-in-law and a good friend at work at HP. We had taken four or five firearms out shooting trap, off of an old logging road. There’s a lot of places around here to go.
I guess I should point out I’m a hunter as well. But not since the gunsmithing has really taken over, because during hunting season I tend to be fixing everybody else’s rifles and shotguns, so I don’t get out that often anymore.
But after returning from that day trip on Memorial Day 22 years ago I came home and put the required piece of wood down on the coffee table so I wouldn’t get thrashed for it by my wife and started cleaning guns so I could sit there and watch TV with her and the kids. I had gotten through I think it was four or five firearms that I had taken and my oldest daughter had taken them back to the gun safe and locked them up for me.
And the one firearm that I had left out was a five shot snub-nosed .38 special revolver that my wife at the time often carried in her purse—she has a concealed carry license—if she was going out to the store after dark or anything else like that. And as such, I had reloaded it so that I could put that in the bedroom up where the kids couldn’t get it and she could reach it later. I happened to glance down at it and noticed an oily thumbprint on a highly polished blue beautiful flawless five shot cylinder and said, “we can’t have that oily print.”
So, I reached down, and I picked up the pistol with all due safety in mind. I guess I should have had a pistol here for an example. My finger was not on the trigger. It was a double action revolver. It was not cocked. And I wiped the hammer with a rag, or not the hammer. I wiped the cylinder with a rag and somehow it snagged on the hammer. I don’t even remember exactly how it happened. Pulled the hammer partway back and then released it while my hand was right here.
And it blew a hole. You can see the scar right here and especially right here. Blew a hole through my hand. On the backside you could have dropped a silver dollar in it. And I was looking right through my hand instantly. I looked over at my wife kind of surprised and she looked at me kind of surprised and she goes, “What the hell did you just do?” I said, “I don’t know, get me a towel.” And she said … it’s funny now in hindsight. And she said, “But your finger wasn’t on the trigger and I said, “I know.”
So yeah, the aftereffects. The immediate aftereffects of the injury obviously were worse than anything. I mean when that type of injury happens, first of all, the first immediate impact is, “holy hell that hurts.” I don’t care how small of a bone gets hit by the smallest bullet, a .38 is not a high-powered firearm and the fifth metacarpal in your right hand is not a very big bone. If you didn’t know already, Hollywood is full of bull. It does not take much to throw you into shock. I have been severely injured in my life before then and after then. But I can tell you, that amount of energy going through your body is enough to shut you down really quick.
I was very fortunate my neighbor across the street at the time was a Navy ROTC OSU student and he was about twice my size and we used to throw the Navy and Marine Corps jokes around, but I have the utmost respect for him especially now today because when he saw me collapse on my way out to my Suburban in the driveway while my wife was getting the kids rounded up, he picked me up and put me in there and just … I don’t know how much time passed but I can tell you it was probably only 20 or 30 seconds from the time I wrapped a clean dishtowel around my hand and said I’ll see you in the Suburban and I don’t remember a whole lot from then. In fact, my wife at the time told me that I passed out some three or four different times between our house and Albany General Hospital. We lived in Albany at that time when that happened and that’s not even a mile-and-a-half.
I still have the pins that were in my hand. I still have the plate, the screws, the bullet. I still have the empty shell. One of my kids trying to be nice for me for Father’s Day one year, washed that rag so there’s no blood on it anymore, but I never told her that I was disappointed. But when you look at that rag, you can clearly see where the muzzle was. It blew a big old hole in it. And just the right distance away, you can also see a very defined snag where the checkering on the top of the hammer, to keep your thumb from slipping off of it, had actually been pulled by the rag. I still have all that stuff. Emotionally I’m not embarrassed about it. But like I said, I’m kind of a unique case where I wasn’t really violating one of the cardinal rules of gun safety. But you can’t cover everything anyway because if you have too many cardinal rules of gun safety, people will only focus on the top two. So, you can’t say, “Oh and by the way, with revolvers and clothing and cloth and rags and gloves, there’s this danger too.”
