This isn't even a real question. There is no such thing as an "accident" with a gun, it's either intentional or negligence.

Wrong and wrong.

There is such a thing as an accidental discharge. It is labelled as such on purpose.

You could term the same thing negligence in some situations (if an accidental discharge happened in a manner that could reasonably be foreseen and people were in danger from it). After seeing hundreds of thousands of rounds go down range I have never seen this happen with my own eyes. I have seen ADs.

This was equipment malfunction. It was probably hammer follow. The fact that he installed aftermarket parts himself is of no consequence without proof that he did it incorrectly. The part could have been faulty. Something else in the firearm may have failed causing the AD. I've had hammer follow on my firearm after receiving it back from a very competent gunsmith.

It was negligent for him to modify his gun as he did it, clearly, since it caused an unintended discharge. Because he followed proper firearm safety at the range, no one was hurt.
Accidents usually happen because of negligence.

I've limited experience with guns, but I will always remember 2 things I was thought the first time I handled one:

1: Always assume the gun is loaded
2: Don't point it at anything you don't want to shoot.

It amazes me how many people don't follow those rules. This guy clearly did and so an accident was prevented.

I remember getting into an argument with a very experienced hunter who kept waving his rifle around in a confined boat cabin. He insisted it wasn't loaded (and it probably wasn't) but it was made clear to him that if he pointed his rifle at anyone again, he was going over the side of the boat.

No, nobody knows if it was negligence or not. He put an aftermarket part in (in good faith). It worked 1000 rounds before an issue manifested itself. As before, you can't prove that it was a fault on his behalf (unlikely if the gun worked for 1000 rounds before having hammer follow), or if the part was faulty (which can manifest at a random time), or if something else entirely caused it.

Rule number one is true only to a certain extent. There comes a point in time when the gun is empty and 100% safe. This has to be the case otherwise you can't clean it and you can't store it empty (as it has to legally be in NZ and Aus).

The way the rule works is, always assume the gun is loaded until everyone in the room is satisfied that it is not. Then it can be safely handled among the people in the room (i.e. inspected, dry fired, cleaned, or stored). Even though everyone knows it is empty you still don't point it at anyone - this is to reinforce the habit of the rule and for ultimate safety (say everyone got it wrong somehow that the gun was empty or not - very unlikely but possible).

It's not wrong. If you choose to operate a device that has the sole purpose of killing and injuring, you are absolutely responsible for whatever happens. It does not matter if the gun operated correctly a million times before, it's -still- your responsibility if something goes wrong.

Now, because he followed proper gun-handling rules, nobody got hurt. But if someone had, he'd have been 100% at fault. There are no accidental shootings, period.

The purpose of the device (a gun) is to propel a projectile at great velocity. The purpose of the projectile is to sometimes kill or injure but mainly just put holes in paper. Just sayin'.

These days firearms are mainly used for shooting steel, cardboard and paper targets. I own competition guns made solely for shooting cardboard and steel. The market determines what they are built and bought for, not you.

Now, you've changed the topic to "responsibility". I hadn't seen anyone here argue he lacked responsibility for the operation of the device. On top of that, if the device is faulty and it malfunctions you are not necessarily liable for what happens. There is case law on this in the USA.

There are accidental shootings. I've literally got a degree in treating people who have been victims of accidental or purposeful shootings. There is lots of case law covering accidental shootings (and the law says that there are accidental shootings). Accidental doesn't mean there won't be repercussions.

Because he ignored the manufacturers warnings/instructions AND disabled a safety feature, I can certainly say he was negligent. I can't be certain that negligence was the cause of the discharge, but I can be almost certain.
As to the 'it worked for 1000 rounds' argument...maintenance is 100% the owners responsibility.

You're not obliged under any circumstances to follow manufacturers warnings or instructions. They are liability limiting instructions (they are for the manufacturers safety against being sued).

Firing pin safety blocks and other "don't sue me" "safety" features are often disabled in competition guns. When something safely fails and nobody is in danger then no negligence has occurred. If you don't get it fixed after the failure then you're negligent at that point.

You don't know if it was a (preventative) maintenance issue. Faulty parts aren't a preventative maintenance issue in this sort of item (since you can't identify a fault until something like this happens - that's when you know it's faulty).

Do you shoot much?

You're only obliged to follow directions if you don't want to be negligent.
No injury does not mean no negligence. Not following safety instructions is negligent, as is removing safety features, why you do it or the fact that others are also negligent does not erase the negligence.
You can certainly identify wear patterns and or cracks before this type of discharge occurs in 99.9999999% of cases. Proper cleaning and inspections are part of gun safety.
Not lately, but in the past, yes. I've never seen an unmodified gun fire unintentionally, but I have seen poorly modified guns 'misfire' on many occasions.

That's not true either. Following their directions doesn't mean you won't be negligent. Not following their direction doesn't mean you are negligent. You're conflating things. Each situation needs to be judged on it's own merits.

Removing safety features is not negligence unless you make the firearm unsafe. None of my firearms have a firing pin block from the factory. They're all safe firearms. My triggers have been lightened - they're still safe firearms. I've seen triggers lightened so much that they are unsafe. As before, each instance is judged on it's own merits.

I'll soon finish my mechanical engineering degree (and don't you know it, I'm looking for a job in firearm designing), so I do know a little about this stuff. Whilst with the proper equipment you can detect crack propagation or premature wear, this is not done on consumer products like firearms. That's why I wrote "this sort of item". Unless you're going to spend more money than the firearm is worth trying to detect cracks, you won't know it has cracked until you visually identify it.

Sure proper cleaning and gun inspection is part of having a safe, well functioning firearm. But don't fool yourself into thinking it's an aeroplane or space shuttle in inspections. Go ask your local gunsmith - the best one you can find - how many times he's done x-ray diffraction on a firearm for preventative maintenance. Chances are he's going to say zero.

Spend 5 seconds on google and I know you will find multiple videos of factory condition firearms discharging unintentionally. You'll also find recall information affecting millions of firearms - firearms at risk of unintentional discharge.

I should have qualified "much". More or less than 2500 rounds a year?

That's just, like, your opinion, man. ;-) I wouldn't rely on that position to help in court.

If you're really studying firearm design, you surely know different safety devices are on different firearms. Not having a certain device is different from inexpertly removing one.

Xray inspection isn't the only method, there's dpi (dye penetrant inspection) , magnetic particle, ultrasonic, eddy current testing, etc. I would be surprised to find a competent gunsmith that had never done at least one of those...I've done it for car parts in my garage, cheaply and easily.

How many videos would I find of well maintained factory condition firearms malfunctioning and discharging? I would expect that to be quite rare.

Thanks to safety features and decent quality control, unintentionally discharging is almost always user error, not malfunction, with rare exceptions like you mentioned. In this case it seems to be malfunction, both of the aftermarket part unprofessionally installed and the safety feature he removed that may have stopped the discharge even with the original failure. Imo, that's negligence, whether it in fact caused the discharge or not, because it made it far more likely to unintentionally discharge.

Lol. Lebowski.

I'm studying mechanical engineering (hons) with masters in biomedical engineering. It's a head fuck. I don't think anyone offers firearm design as a major itself.

The trigger finger is the primary safety (debatable), and there is usually a secondary safety and sometimes a tertiary safety. It's true that not having it is different than removing it but sometimes they are redundant. For example the palm safety (a tertiary safety on most guns) is often pinned to turn it off permanently because it didn't add any real benefit.

The particular gun in question looks like a CZ-75. A little hunting in the Youtube comments and other people agree. This particular model originally had a firing pin block which was eventually removed on later models (that have the same internals) because it wasn't needed (probably because they also have a thumb safety). This allowed for the short reset disconnector to be put in place (which is a factory part). So CZ ships two lines of the same gun - one with the firing pin block and one without. You're not suddenly unsafe if you remove it from the model that has it. With the quality of the video the way it is though, it could end up being another gun entirely.

Yes, x-ray diffraction is not the only method. It was an example only. The point being that your average gun owner and gunsmiths don't use these sorts of techniques as regular preventative maintenance. And they don't need to, guns are cheap and replacement parts are cheap. If something breaks you replace it. Some parts are replaced on a maintenance schedule (springs spring to mind). Most people never fire enough rounds through their firearms to need to replace anything.

Factory condition firearms malfunctioning is not rare. Factory condition firearms self firing is quite rare. But several model firearms have been affected over the years (meaning millions of firearms). But usually the problem is with a small batch of firearms from within those millions but they always do a blanket recall.

I agree, unintentional firing of a gun is almost always user error.

I still don't believe their is enough information from the video and accompanying text to make a judgment call on this guy.

If that's right, then he also had his safety off when he wasn't ready to fire....to me, that's (in a small way) negligent.
I have a really hard time seeing any possibility that this wasn't the owner/operators fault.

Moving this video to SFOGuy's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.