CHEYENNE — For those wondering how a dog could pull off shooting a woman with a shotgun while stopped for gas in Nebraska, the answer is simple — it pulled the trigger.
That’s the only way a loaded, properly functioning shotgun could go off, said Arthur Huckfeldt and Ryan Allen at Frontier Arms and Supply in Cheyenne.
Simply bumping or jostling a shotgun won’t set it off, said Huckfeldt.
“That’s impossible. The trigger has to be manipulated,” he told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday while demonstrating with a shotgun in the East Lincolnway gun shop.
If someone were to say their shotgun went off because it was knocked over or kicked around by a dog, “that someone is lying out their ass,” he added. “That wouldn’t do it.”
‘Heard A Shotgun Blast’
Huckfeldt and Allen, who owns the shop, were weighing in on the question people are asking after a Saturday incident when a dog shifting in the back seat of a truck parked at a convenience store fired a loaded shotgun.
The blast put a hole through the front passenger door of the truck, and a single pellet traveled to a nearby intersection, hitting a woman in a car parked at a stoplight.
“The owner of the truck had pulled into the convenience store to purchase merchandise,” says the Scottsbluff Police Department in a statement about the incident.
“While the passenger of the truck was standing near the front passenger side door, a dog in the back seat moved from one side of the vehicle to the other,” the statement says. “During that movement, the dog triggered a shotgun that had a live shell in the chamber, causing the firearm to discharge.”
Craig Grass owns the Short Stop gas station and convenience store, and was working when the dog fired the shotgun. He told Cowboy State Daily that he heard the blast and knew right away what it was.
“The people (who came in the truck) were in the store shopping and the wife went outside,” he said. “They thought they heard a shotgun blast, but nobody really knew for sure. Then they saw the door had a hole in it.”
The blast through the door was toward the gas pumps, Grass said, adding that he wasn’t worried pellets from the shotgun would touch off an explosion.
“The pumps are safe and really well-built,” he said. “It’s not like in the movies where you touch it and it blows up. There’s a lot of safety built into those pumps, they cost a lot and there wasn’t really any danger.”
‘Put It In The Case’
While answering how a dog can fire a shotgun is easy — pull the trigger, remember? — there are a lot of missing variables in the Nebraska scenario, both Huckfeldt and Allen said.
The Scottsbluff Police Department didn’t respond to a Cowboy State Daily request for more information, like the breed and size of the dog, model of the shotgun, and whether the gun had a safety that was activated.
While they have no clue about those first two nuggets of information, Huckfeldt and Allen both said if the safety was on, the gun wouldn’t have gone off.
“If a 60-pound dog engaged with that trigger, it’d go off, like if it catches a claw or pad in that trigger guard,” Allen said.
It would only take about 3-5 pounds of pressure, added Huckfeldt.
Even then, “I would think it would be really hard for a dog to shoot a shotgun,” he said. “The dog would have to have a small (paw) pad, unless it was a small dog. But that’s just a lot of conjecture.”
Both agree that what happened Saturday at the Short Stop in Scottsbluff was “very unusual.”
“But Nebraska’s weird,” Huckfeldt added.
While it’s fun to joke about a dog shooting a shotgun, it’s only so because nobody was seriously hurt. One thing the Cheyenne gun experts said they know for sure is that if the shotgun had been stored properly in the back seat of the truck, it wouldn’t have fired.
“If you have firearms, they should be secured, put it in the case or in a rack,” Allen said. “Not haphazardly lying around in the back seat.”
He said the lesson here is, “Don’t be a dum-dum, or as my dad would say, don’t be a shithead.”
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
