Here we go again. There are more ways to shoot yourself or someone else than the Russian roulette idjits we’ve already discussed. There are also right ways and wrong ways to shoot skells invading your home. Do it wrong, and the legal system that was so lenient towards them will land on you with both feet.

• There’s the marital-squabble idjits who were fighting over a gun. Victory went to the gun as both were injured, the husband critically.

• There’s the GI whose accident’s specifics are unreported. Yes, being a professional gun user does not inoculate you from accidental death and dismemberment. Only following the basic safety rules. And it doesn’t matter whether you use the NRA’s or Cooper’s slightly variant rules. Follow either one and there is no fatal ND in your future.

• There’s the Tennessee teenager who was downrange checking targets with his dad when a woman back at the firing line decided just to “move” a .22 single-action revolver. “It just went off.” Sure it did, put your finger on the trigger and they do that. It was a near-run thing, but the kid is expected to recover now. “Cheatham County Sheriff John Holder said that basic gun safety rules were broken, leading to the accident.” Sounds about right to us. The careless lady will not be charged (which is probably the right decision in a case which was simple carelessness and not malignant negligence).

• There’s the Missouri 11-year-old whose father was teaching him — we are not making this up — gun safety. What a memorable lesson, to get an ambulance ride, an air ambulance ride, a surgery or two, and, oh yeah, gunshot wounds to the hand and jaw! (The kid’s going to be OK. Family hunting trip’s postponed. Prosecutors considering charging the dad, which in our opinion would be the wrong decision… he probably ain’t gonna do that again). Hell of a way to teach yourself gun safety. It is better to try to learn from the other guy’s experience than hope to survive learning from your own.

• And then there’s something different. Meet Byron Smith, the Minnesota retiree who told investigators that, after wounding two home invaders, he executed them, one with a “good, clean finishing shot” to put an end to her suffering. Yeah, this one doesn’t really look like an accident, does it? Looks like he’s going to Crowbar Motel. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for the home invaders — play stupid games, win stupid prizes — but this would-be home defender seems scarcely any smarter, and the same aphorism applies to him. For any one who moans that “Tony Soprano did stuff like this and got away with it,” remember two things: 1. Tony Soprano was a fictional character, and a violent criminal at that. And 2. Tony always took care to hide the bodies, whether it was in the sausage grinder at Satriale’s Meat Market or on Uncle whatshisname’s farm. This assclown let them ripen overnight, then called a neighbor to ask if he knew a lawyer — the neighbor called authorities. The link at the Minneapolis Red Star Tribune goes on and on about the innocent wonderfulness of the two home invaders, and shows innocent happy pictures. Who seem to have been drug users (there’s a shock) and hardened criminals despite their youth and may have been responsible for five to seven previous break-ins of the same guy’s home, as well as other burglaries, one of them a few hours before their well-deserved removal from the gene pool. As another one of their burglary victims put it, “…[V]ery sad that they lost their lives.In the same instance, if they hadn’t been breaking into houses, they’d be alive.”

Of course, from the point of view of the two dead burglars, it’s a story of unintended death. Sucks to be them. No doubt the public has been saved the cost of future trials and incarceration for those two worthless punks. But the public will have to pay to try and incarcerate Byron Smith, the home defender. The prosecutor and cops wouldn’t bother with small-time burglaries, but now they have a real crime to prosecute. Luckily for the prosecutor, we’re not in his jury pool, but we do understand the concept of minimal use of lethal force. That’s why it’s important to use a suitable defensive caliber and make incapacitating bullet placements with every shot. If the guy hadn’t armed himself with .22s and fired ineffectual shots initially, he wouldn’t have made the blood-up bad decision to execute the punks.

Dirty Harry can do that. He’s a fictional character, too.