This Is Why You Shouldn’t Store Guns In Ovens

By Tom Knighton Bearing Arms

I've written about the obligation of every gun owner to make sure their weapons are stored properly. I generally don't get into specifics on what “properly” entails because I figure if you're here, you probably already know that it means a gun lock at a minimum and a gun safe ideally.

However, some people aren't that smart.

A park ranger at Yosemite once allegedly remarked that the reason it was so hard to create a bear-proof trash can was because there was a considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.

That apparently holds true for people with guns looking to store them. I mean, I didn't think there'd be a need to tell people not to store their loaded guns in the oven, and yet here we are.

Police in Virginia have issued a warning for people not to store guns, or anything else, inside their ovens after a frightening incident. 

Chesterfield Police said last week, firefighters responded to a home after the owner's oven exploded. 

An investigation revealed that someone turned on the over with a handgun inside. The weapon heated up, and five rounds went off. 

No one was injured, thankfully, but this one is…special.

Normally, if you throw rounds in a fire, they'll cook off, but because there's no barrel to direct the energy, the bullet itself doesn't do all that much.

If you put a semi-automatic firearm in the oven, however, and turn it on, the round in the chamber cooking off will send a round down range just like someone pulling the trigger. Plus, since this was a semi-auto, it worked the action four more times.

My guess is a round cooked off inside the magazine somewhere along the line so it basically ran out of ammo before firing off the full magazine.

It was just good fortune that no one was injured in this example of outright human stupidity, and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt by thinking the person who turned on the oven wasn't the person who put a gun in there in the first place. I wouldn't put money on that being the case, though.

I mean, sure, the oven isn't the first place I'd look for a gun. There are a lot of hiding places that I'd consider well before then, so on that front, I don't suppose it's the dumbest place to store a firearm–assuming that you remove it before firing up the oven or the oven doesn't work and can't be fired up–but it's far from the smartest place to hide one.

Had someone been injured, someone would be facing charges. Of course, we don't know that charges weren't filed as it is, but “gross stupidity” isn't a criminal offense. If it were, there are a lot of politicians that would be behind bars. But depending on how law enforcement officers looked at it, this could be discharging a firearm in the city limits, which many communities have laws against.

So charges might have been filed.

Regardless, and I don't believe I'm about to say this, don't store guns inside of your appliances, especially those that create a great deal of heat.

There's not enough bourbon in the world after this one.

Find the original article in its entirety on Bearing Arms.

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