A dog has shot his owner as the unsuspecting man lay in bed.
Memphis man Jerald Kirkwood told police the dog leapt onto the bed and got his paw stuck in the trigger guard causing the gun to go off. Thankfully the bullet only grazed the man's thigh.
Local news station WREG explained how the man’s one-year-old pit bull, Oreo, had accidentally squeezed the trigger and shot his owner.
The woman who was on the bed with Kirkwood at the time, reportedly fled the home and took the gun with her as the wounded man was rushed to a hospital in non-critical condition.
The woman later told Mephis' Fox13 that Oreo “is a playful dog, and he likes to jump around and stuff like that, and it just went off”.
The combination of the gunshot and Oreo jumping on the bed woke the woman up. The pair (the humans in this story) vowed to work on maintaining gun safety in their home going forward.
“Keep the safety on or use a trigger lock,” the woman said after the shooting. Police have classified the shooting as an accidental injury requiring no action against Oreo or his owner, according to Fox 13.
Most gun injuries requiring hospitalization in the US are unintentional, non-profit Brady: United Against Gun Violence has found. Gun control is a hot topic in the US often becoming a political issue despite the death toll firearms bring.
In the US, civilian-owned guns in the US outnumber people, with the population exceeding 340 million.
In 2018, Richard Remme of Fort Dodge, Iowa, was shot in the leg by a gun that he had tucked into his waistband while playing with his pit bull-labrador mix, Balew.
Another dog-on-human shooting occurred in 2019, when former Louisiana State University football player Matt Branch was shot in the leg by his black labrador retriever. The dog stepped on a hunting shotgun that had been placed in the back of a vehicle on a hunting trip in Mississippi.
Branch’s leg had to subsequently be amputated and he spent 12 days unconscious, barely surviving the ordeal. He was later fitted with a titanium prosthetic leg and began walking again. Despite the injury he resolved to continue hunting.
“I was happy to be alive rather than mad I lost my leg,” Branch told Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger.
Nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in the United States in 2023, according to the latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While the number of gun deaths in the U.S. fell for the second consecutive year, it remained among the highest annual totals on record, reports PEW.