A Pennsylvania man is recovering in the hospital this week after joining the ever-growing list of people who have been shot by dogs.
According to Shillington Police, officers responded late Tuesday night to a report of a 53-year-old man with a gunshot wound to the back. When they arrived, they found him conscious on the floor, wounded but able to explain what had happened.
The man told police he had been cleaning his shotgun and set it on the bed. Then he sat down, and one of his dogs hopped up beside him, landing squarely on the firearm and triggering a blast directly into his lower back. His son was in the house, but not in the room, and the other two dogs were uninvolved.
Paramedics rushed him to a nearby hospital, where he was taken into surgery. As of Thursday, police say he has undergone at least one surgery and will need another, though the full extent of his injuries isn’t yet known. Authorities believe the shooting was accidental, but the investigation is ongoing.
Now, this might feel like a freak one-in-a-million accident, but it very much isn’t. Dogs have been accidentally shooting humans for nearly a century. Way back in 2013, I detailed the long, long, looooong history of dogs shooting people. There are examples of this happening dating back to 1928. It kept happening throughout the 20th century, then again in the 2000s, 2010s, and now the 2020s.
A coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Suspicious? Absolutely. I’m not saying dogs have it out for us, specifically, but if you are handling guns, try to keep them off the bed, because an opportunistic dog might seize the chance to make its murderous intentions look like a mere accident—an accident that suspiciously keeps happening over and over again.
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