We wish we could have good news about gun safety. But generally, if it’s news, it isn’t good, and if it’s good, it isn’t news. Alas. But human nature (and newsman nature) being what it is, on to the news. Beginning with police officers behaving badly:

• A police chief shot himself. Oh wait, it was the police chief in Fayetteville, NC, and she shot herself. Same difference. Our therory behind self-inflicted white shirt shootings: it’s all that elite Only Ones police training, especially the kind that ambitious chain-of-command-climbers tend to have. They’re not talking about how this happened, and stonewalling the press, which is proof positive it was something really stupid, as well as criminally negligent. But it’s OK ’cause she’s a cop.

• This isn’t entirely accidental, but it’s unintentional. Three cops relying on their superior Only Ones training to subdue a domestic violence suspect in the station in nearly (legal) gun-free New Jersey wound up wounded when the suspect got hold of somebody’s service pistol. The cops will survive thanks to luck and vests, but mostly luck, although one’s wound is serious. The suspect is dead, which is only fair. It’s generally unwise to trust your life to luck, but shooting the moon paid off for these officers. Don’t you try it because about all the luck in the world has been used up.
• One phrase that makes the hair on the back of one’s neck stand up is, “playing with a gun.” It all too often ends like this:

According to the Sheriff’s office investigation, Caleb Frisbey age 17, and Michael Johnson also 17, were playing around with an unloaded gun, when Caleb Frisbey picked up a another handgun that was holstered.

He reportedly pointed that pistol at Johnson and pulled the trigger. The gun was loaded and the .44 caliber bullet struck Johnson.

Two lives destroyed. Just like that.

• And there’s always the old “a gun went off.” In this North Carolina case, another teen is dead and the guy whose hand the gun went off in is in jail.

• A young man was showing off his gun to a friend in the kitchen, while a party was going on in a Spokane house. BANG. A young woman is in critical condition with a GSW of the head. The gun owner is not under arrest, yet, but the gun is.

• Two brothers, playing with a gun. Memphis, Tennessee; they were ten and twelve years old. One is now dead. There’s adult negligence at the bottom of this.

• Two brothers again, in Minnesota. Four-year-old shot two-year-old dead. Father is now on trial, doubly unfortunate to live in a city with an anti-gun and camera-happy, politically ambitious prosecutor.

• We’ve mentioned this Virginia incident before, but the gun wielder is now on trial. He and the victim were doing drugs and playing Russian roulette… as if drugs weren’t Russian roulette enough.

• And this one happened last month, in Mercer Island, Washington, but we’re throwing it in just so we can close on another cop shooting himself.

To our readers: don’t do that! To our police readers, this means you too. You’re sworn officers, not bulletproof ones.