Fort Lauderdale Injury Lawyer Blog

If you read the newspapers in South Florida recently, you may have noticed that there is an increase in the number of accidental gun shootings reported. For example, the two incidents below were reported in a recent edition of the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel.

In Miami a woman was taken to the hospital after her husband claims he accidentally shot her when he thought she was a burglar in their home.

In Eatonville, Florida, a teenager was accidentally shot and killed by a 6-year-old child. At the time of the shooting, the boy was playing video games in his home when he was shot in the head. The child who fired the gun, found the handgun from the floor and thought it was a toy.

As more and more guns are manufactured, sold, lost, stolen, and re-sold, these guns will end up in many more Florida households. The end result will be that as the number of guns in homes increase, there will be an increase in the number of unintended shootings of innocent people, often loved ones. In some of these cases, the homeowners insurance may provide coverage for the shooting victims.

In most of these cases, the guns will be unsecured. They may be placed in a location where children can get to them with little or no effort and there will not be any trigger locks or other devices to prevent the guns from being accidentally discharged in the home. Likewise, homeowners may mistakenly think there is an intruder in their homes and fire at their own family members. All of these situations are eminently preventable by either using more caution in securing the gun or only firing the gun when the shooter is certain of the identity of the target.

At the end of the day, each home owner contemplating keeping a gun in their house should weigh the potential increase to their personal safety against the possibility that an unintended tragedy may result.

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Negligent gun shootings are on the rise in Broward and Palm Beach counties. Negligent shootings involve the unintentional discharge of a firearm. These typically occur when a loaded gun is not adequately secured and children or adults unfamiliar with a firearm get their hands on the gun which fires. The overwhelming majority of these incidents are easily preventable.

Since last year, nearly a dozen shootings have occurred resulting in serious injury or death which marks a dramatic increase over past years.

One of the most tragic stories involves a Deerfield Beach father who left his loaded gun in his pickup truck where his 10-year-old son discovered it and fatally shot his 11-year-old brother.

In the vast majority of negligent shootings, unfamiliarity with the firearms by the owner was the root cause. Many gun owners fail to understand that with semi-automatic weapons, even though the magazine which holds the bullets is removed from the gun, a bullet can still be in the chamber and can be fired if the trigger is pulled. In addition to simply a lack of knowledge regarding gun safety, every new hand gun sold today comes with a trigger lock which, if used, would have prevented all of the South Florida tragedies.

In each of these negligent shootings, the owner exhibited a lack of common sense. As long as the discharge of the firearm was not intentional, the victim of these shootings may recover from the gun's owner home insurance policy under a theory of negligence. If you or a loved one has been injured by the accidental discharge of a gun, you need to be aware of the possibility that you may be able to recover for your damages.

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