A 13-year-old in Chicago takes his father’s pistol out of a lockbox and removes the magazine from the weapon. He shows the gun to a neighbor the same age, and pretends to fire it several times.
Two former Marines in their 20s meet up to watch a Miami Dolphins game in Florida. One pulls out the Glock he just got for Christmas, taking out the magazine before handing it to the other.
A 64-year-old grandfather in Texas ejects the magazine from his gun, preparing to clean it, pointing the barrel toward the wall. His grandson’s friend is in a bedroom on the other side.
Each thinks the gun in their hand is unloaded because the magazine holding the bullets has been removed.
None of them realize there is still a single live round in each gun’s chamber, bullets that will kill their neighbor, their Marine buddy, and their grandson’s friend when they pull the trigger.
It’s a danger that gunmakers have been aware of since the advent of the first semiautomatic pistols — yet it continues to kill.
Joshua Adames, the young victim in Chicago, died in May 2001. “When I see all my grandchildren together, he’s missing. I miss him,” said Rosalia Diaz, his grandmother. “I never want to see a gun in my life.”
Since 2000, at least 277 people have been killed in gun accidents in which the shooter believed the weapon was unloaded because the magazine had been dislodged or removed, an NBC News investigation found. That total — based on federal data collected from states, as well as media reports, lawsuits and public records — is likely a significant undercount since many states only recently began reporting their data, and information on the cases may be incomplete. NBC News found 41 cases that weren’t captured in the data.
In 2021, the most recent year of federal data available, at least 42 people died in such accidents.
People have also suffered grave injuries. In Kansas, a college football player lost his leg after a teammate fired a weapon in 2018 that he thought was unloaded. In Michigan, a pregnant woman was accidentally shot and wounded by her husband, an Army soldier. And earlier this year, a customer inside a crowded Florida gun show was shot in the foot when another man unwittingly fired off a live round.
More than a hundred years ago, gunmakers devised a way to prevent this type of accident from ever happening. A small metal piece known as a magazine disconnect keeps a pistol from firing if the magazine is removed. Many gun safety advocates see the device as a simple solution to foreseeable tragedy — one that would work automatically, with no user effort or knowledge required.
But gunmakers don’t have to include the device in their weapons. So, for the most part, they don’t.
A warning label in an owners manual for a gun without a magazine disconnect explains that removing the magazine does not unload the pistol.
“It would be a design defect in any other conceivable product in the American marketplace,” said Gary Klein, a former assistant attorney general of Massachusetts and an advocate for safer guns. “We wouldn’t tolerate this in a toaster.”
The federal government regulates the sale and purchase of firearms. But unlike the vast majority of consumer goods, guns are not overseen by any national product safety agency. And when accidents do occur, a federal law shields gunmakers from liability if the gun was used unlawfully.
With guns increasingly purchased for personal safety rather than hunting, buyers have also gravitated toward new weapons less likely to have magazine disconnects. For many, having a bullet ready to fire at a moment’s notice — even without a magazine in place — is seen as a benefit, not a drawback.
“If the magazine gets dislodged or damaged and you can’t function a firearm in a life-or-death situation, using a firearm for self-defense — that’s a significant problem,” said Larry Keane, general counsel and chief lobbyist for the NSSF, the largest firearms trade association in the U.S. NBC News contacted more than a dozen handgun manufacturers, including companies that incorporate the device in some models and those that do not. All but one did not respond and none agreed to answer questions.
As for the risk posed by a seemingly unloaded weapon, industry groups and firearms experts say these accidents are relatively rare and happen only after people have violated the cardinal rules of gun safety: that all guns should be treated as if they are loaded and should never be pointed at someone the user doesn’t intend to shoot.
Safety advocates argue it’s not realistic to expect that that will always happen. The accidents compiled by NBC News include shooters of all ages, backgrounds and experience levels. But what they all have in common is a single deadly error with devastating consequences.
“It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault,” a 21-year-old in Texas told his mother over the phone, according to police records. “I killed my best friend.”
Hector Adames looks through old photos and mementos of his late nephew Joshua Adames.
It was a quiet May afternoon in 2001, and Joshua Adames was itching to leave the house. Since moving to his uncle’s place the previous year, the tall, dark-eyed 13-year-old had been quick to make friends at his new middle school.
So Hector Adames didn’t think twice when his nephew wanted to head out that Saturday. “Can I go by Billy’s house?” he asked.
Hector gave his nephew a quick hug before letting him go.
When Joshua got to Billy Swan’s house down the street, his friend had something to show him.
From his parents’ closet, Billy had taken a hefty pistol that belonged to his father, a deputy sheriff in Cook County, Illinois, court records said. Billy had removed the magazine from the Beretta, so he assumed it was unloaded. He pretended to fire it several times.
Then he squeezed the trigger all the way — sending a bullet straight into Joshua’s stomach.
By the time his uncle got to the hospital, Joshua had died.
“My nephew should be here today,” says Hector Adames, seen here outside his home in Yorkville, Ill.
Billy, who was 13 at the time of the shooting, was found guilty in juvenile court of involuntary manslaughter and recklessly discharging a firearm. His father was charged with improperly storing the weapon but was later exonerated. Billy Swan did not respond to a request for comment; his father has since died.
But Hector Adames doesn’t think they were the only ones at fault.
Since the shooting, he has become an advocate for gun safety, speaking out against the industry and gun-rights advocates who have sought to insulate gun manufacturers from regulation and lawsuits.
A magazine disconnect “is one piece they could have added and they chose not to,” he said, referring to gunmakers. “They are actually fueling the fire — not reducing the likelihood of it happening again.”
Adames has now spent decades watching in frustration as the same preventable accident killed hundreds of others.
“My nephew should be here today. I should have taught him how to drive, walk down the aisle to graduate, come and tell me, ‘I’m in love with this girl,’” Adames said. “If you can make weapons safer now, why would you not?”
John Browning’s patent application for a pistol with a magazine disconnect.
Unlike sophisticated gun safety technology like fingerprint recognition, the magazine disconnect is straightforward and low-tech.
In 1911, famed firearm designer John Browning received a patent for a pistol with a small internal lever that would prevent it from firing when the magazine was removed.
The device was meant to “insure absolutely against the dangerous accidental firing sometimes liable to occur if the trigger is pulled after the magazine has been withdrawn, in the belief that all cartridges have been removed,” Browning wrote in his patent filing.
The magazine disconnect was specifically designed to be used in pistols with magazines, which feed bullets into the chamber, unlike revolvers, in which bullets are loaded manually. Pistols equipped with the device soon caught on with the military and then law enforcement. Apart from helping to avoid accidents, they offered another potential advantage in combat: A user could press the magazine release button to prevent their gun from being turned against them.
“We know there have been lives saved in the struggle for the gun where the person activated that button as a kill switch,” said Massad Ayoob, a firearms instructor and former police officer who believes people should have a choice of guns with or without the safety feature.
How a magazine disconnect works
Pulling a trigger sets off a chain reaction inside a handgun. Multiple internal parts must connect for the weapon to fire.
Gareth Fowler for NBC News
In this gun with a magazine disconnect, ejecting the magazine causes a small metal piece to move backward. That prevents two parts from connecting, so the gun cannot fire.
Gareth Fowler for NBC News
When the magazine is inserted, the pieces once again connect and the gun can be fired.
Gareth Fowler for NBC News
By the 1970s and ‘80s, police officers across the country were carrying Smith & Wesson pistols with magazine disconnects — handguns that were also available to the broader public.
But just as guns with the feature were gaining traction with law enforcement, the gun industry was working to ensure that the federal government would never have the authority to require magazine disconnects or any other safety mechanism.
When the Consumer Product Safety Commission was created in 1972, firearms were exempted from its oversight. The carveout was engineered by then-Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who was also an NRA board member while in Congress.
Former Rep. John Dingell, seen here in 2002, pushed for guns to be exempt from product safety oversight.
The exemption still stands: Unlike virtually every other consumer product, firearms can’t be subject to mandatory recalls or regulated by federal product safety officials.
In the 1990s, amid rising gun violence, bereaved families and public officials turned to the courts instead, filing a raft of lawsuits that blamed the industry for peddling what they described as an “unreasonably dangerous” product.
Glock advertisements from the 1990s, when the company’s pistols were becoming increasingly popular in the U.S.
In 1998, then-New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial sued 15 gunmakers for failing to make magazine disconnects and other safety features standard in their firearms. “What makes the violence in our community so vile and so heinous is that it can be prevented,” Morial said at the time.
Under pressure from local governments and the Clinton administration, which was also threatening to sue, one company proved willing to negotiate. Smith & Wesson voluntarily agreed, among other product safety changes, to make magazine disconnects available as an option on all its pistols. The agreement sparked a ferocious backlash from gun-rights advocates and industry groups, and led to a boycott that nearly drove Smith & Wesson out of business. The company, which ultimately abandoned the agreement, did not respond to requests for comment.
Emboldened by the win, gunmakers lobbied Congress for special protection. In 2005, lawmakers passed a federal liability shield that limits lawsuits against gun manufacturers when weapons are used unlawfully.
“No other industry is forced to defend themselves when a violent criminal they do not know, have never met and cannot control, misuses a legal non-defective product,” Wayne LaPierre, then the executive vice president of the NRA, said in a statement, calling the law a “historic victory.”
A father and daughter look at handguns at the annual NRA convention in Dallas in 1996.
For the Adames family, it was another blow. When they sued Beretta, the gunmaker, over Joshua’s death, an Illinois court threw out the case, citing the new law. Beretta did not respond to requests for comment.
By deterring lawsuits, the 2005 law also took the pressure off other gunmakers to add safety features, such as the magazine disconnect, consumer safety advocates said.
“There are pressure points to change the industry and get them to make the product safer,” said Jonathan Lowy, founder and president of Global Action on Gun Violence, who has represented dozens of shooting victims. The federal liability shield “took away a pressure point, and that stopped some of the progress that we were seeing.”
John Burnsworth III was 14 when he stood in a kitchen and held a gun for the first time. It was March 2016, and he was hanging out with his friend from middle school, J.R. Gustafson, in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, the small town where they both lived.
Burnsworth pressed a small button to remove the magazine from the weapon, just as he would with a BB gun, he said in an interview.
“Freeze, hold your hands up!” Burnsworth jokingly called out to his friend — not realizing there was still a live round in the chamber.
The bullet struck 13-year-old J.R. in the head, and he collapsed to the floor.
J.R. Gustafson.
The police arrived before the paramedics. An hour later, according to police records, J.R. was pronounced dead.
Burnsworth still remembers exactly how it happened: the flash of the gun, the blood pouring from his friend’s right eye, the casing hitting the floor near the refrigerator. He recalls the terror of sitting in the police car outside.
“I thought I was going to do life in prison,” he said. “I was just a young kid afraid for his life.”
He ultimately pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in juvenile court, spent months in juvenile detention, and then was sent to reform school. Both the gun owner and a babysitter who gave Burnsworth the weapon pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a maximum of 23 months in jail. They did not respond to requests for comment; through their lawyer, the Gustafson family declined to comment.
Like the Adames family, J.R.’s parents hold the person who fired the gun responsible but also believe the manufacturer played a role in their son’s death. The Gustafsons are suing Springfield Armory for failing to equip its XD-9 semiautomatic pistol with a magazine disconnect or a more prominent loaded chamber indicator, a tiny metal piece meant to show whether there is a cartridge in the chamber.
But unlike the Adames’ lawsuit, the Gustafsons’ hasn’t been thrown out — and could dramatically change the way such cases are handled.
Though an appeals court rejected the notion that lacking a safety device constitutes a gun defect, it agreed with the suit’s assertion that the federal liability shield infringes upon states’ rights — in this case, Pennsylvania’s law governing lawsuits.
Springfield Armory, in its defense, points to decades of court decisions upholding the liability shield.
“It’s a horrible tragedy for the family who lost a child. But the person who pulled the trigger is the one that is responsible — or the adults who left the gun not secured,” said Keane of the NSSF, which has supported Springfield Armory in the case. “That’s not the responsibility of the manufacturer.” Springfield Armory did not respond to requests for comment.
Gunmakers and industry advocates aren’t the only ones who see gun accidents as primarily a failure of personal responsibility.
Sharon Skipper, a retired teaching assistant in Florida, lost her 25-year-old son, Thomas Gage Skipper, in January.
Gage, as he was known, had been watching a football game with his friend Tyler Shepperd when he took out the Christmas gift he’d just received from his parents: a Glock 9-millimeter handgun. The men had been best friends since elementary school, and had enlisted and served in the U.S. Marine Corps together.
Thomas Gage Skipper.
Gage removed the magazine from the gun before he handed it to his friend, an eyewitness told a local news outlet. Shepperd, reportedly thinking it was unloaded, jokingly put the gun to his own head before turning it on his friend and pulling the trigger. Gage was pronounced dead a short time later at a hospital.
In an interview seven months after her son’s death, Skipper said she considered the shooting an accident that stemmed from both men’s irresponsible behavior and she doesn’t believe Shepperd, who now faces a manslaughter charge, should face prison. Through his attorney, Shepperd declined to comment.
“They were grown men who were playing with a gun,” she said. “They weren’t children. They were trained in guns.”
A supporter of gun rights, she said in the interview that she didn’t know about magazine disconnects and had “never given a second thought” to pushing for safer guns.
“I can’t really go around talking about how there needs to be more gun safety for 25-year-old men who know better,” she said.
But in a second interview months later, Skipper said that after talking with NBC News she had come around to the idea that more guns should have magazine disconnects.
“I got to thinking if there was something that could prevent this from happening to someone else,” she said, “then yeah, that would be a great thing.”
Despite its early promise, the magazine disconnect has been pushed to the margins of the American handgun market.
Just two out of the 20 top-selling handguns in an NBC News analysis of retail data have it as a standard feature. And law enforcement agencies that previously required magazine disconnects in standard-issue weapons have largely moved to guns without them.
Though the legal protections for gunmakers have made it easier for them to eschew the feature, consumer preferences have also changed over time.
With gun owners more inclined to purchase a weapon for personal defense rather than hunting or recreational shooting, many are drawn to newer handguns like the Glock, an Austrian-designed weapon intentionally stripped of some older safety features to make it easier to fire.
Gun users practice shooting Glock pistols at a concealed carry permit class in Rexburg, Idaho, in 2023.
Glocks feature a lighter trigger pull than earlier generations of handguns, and have neither a magazine disconnect nor a thumb safety, a lever that needs to be flicked off to fire the weapon. Instead, an internal mechanism prevents the trigger from being pulled accidentally if it is dropped, the company says on its website. The pistols also come with a loaded chamber indicator.
But that doesn’t prevent a Glock from firing without a magazine, as the owner’s manual makes clear: The gun “will fire if the trigger is pulled when there is a round in the chamber, even with the magazine removed.”
Glock did not respond to requests for comment.
“Having something that disables the gun — that is not what a lot of people are looking for,” said Preston Spicher, a gunsmith and gun dealer in Delaware. Magazine disconnects are “becoming much less common for sure.”
Consumers may have moved on, but the deadly accidents have persisted.
In one case reported by media in Knoxville, Tennessee, an 11-year-old shot and killed his 20-year-old brother in 2009 after the 20-year-old — a competitive sharpshooter and aspiring Olympian — let him handle the pistol, thinking it was unloaded.
In another case, a woman in Las Vegas took out her new pistol in 2020 while walking in a dark parking lot with her 3-year-old and her friends, according to a police report.
“There’s nothing in there,” she told her friends, removing the magazine while her toddler walked ahead of her. She then pulled the trigger, inadvertently killing her son.
And in May, a 69-year-old Florida woman found her pistol in a piece of luggage, without the magazine inserted. She passed it to her roommate, thinking it was unloaded, and accidentally shot and killed her. “One stupid mistake of not making sure the f—ing chamber was empty when you thought it was,” she told police.
Industry groups like the NSSF say the best way to prevent such tragedies is for gun owners to store their weapons properly and educate themselves about how they function. But safety advocates say that consumers misuse products all the time and manufacturers should help protect them.
Lowy, who is representing the Gustafson family, compared firearm safety devices to airbags and seatbelts — once highly contentious features in cars that are now mandatory.
“It’s much easier to redesign a product to make it safer, than redesign a person to make them safer,” he said.
Even among blue states, product safety requirements for firearms remain rare.
California is the only one that requires new handguns purchased in the state to have both a magazine disconnect and a loaded chamber indicator. It’s the strictest law of its kind in the country — and one the state is now battling to keep.
The state’s requirements have changed the national firearms market, at least somewhat: Two guns with magazine disconnects — labeled “California compliant” — were among the top sellers last year, according to NBC News’s analysis, and both were made by Sig Sauer.
On its website, Sig Sauer says its California-compliant M18 pistol has “the same unprecedented accuracy, extreme reliability, and unmatched durability.” Smith & Wesson, Springfield Armory and Ruger have also introduced new California-compliant pistols. Sig Sauer declined to comment, and the other manufacturers did not respond.
A billboard announcing the introduction of Sig Sauer’s P365 handgun in California in 2023.
But even as some gunmakers are trying to tap a new market, the California Rifle and Pistol Association, a Second Amendment advocacy group, is now pushing to overturn California’s law — with the support of the NSSF.
Some congressional Republicans have gone a step further, recently introducing bills in both the U.S. House and Senate that would prohibit any state from mandating such gun safety features, calling the requirements “unnecessary and overly stringent.”
Reno May, a 30-year-old engineer and a plaintiff in the suit against the California law, is among many gun enthusiasts who believe the state’s restrictions violate the Second Amendment. On YouTube, where he has more than a quarter-million followers, he has voiced frustration that many popular handguns, such as newer-model Glocks, are illegal to buy new at retail stores in California.
In his own shooting practice, May said, he’s had magazines jostled out of place and worries that a gun with a magazine disconnect could leave him in a dangerous situation without a bullet at the ready.
“For firearms intended for personal protection, home defense and that kind of thing, it is a huge problem because it introduces a failure point, and it’s a failure point that can’t be remedied quickly,” he said.
A federal court is expected to issue a decision in the coming months. If California’s law stands, it could prompt other states to expand similar handgun safety requirements — unless Congress acts to stop states from passing such laws altogether.
On the other side of the country, in Pennsylvania, the Gustafsons await a decision on their own lawsuit challenging the industry’s liability shield. If they prevail, other families of shooting victims could potentially sue and help compel safety changes.
But a defeat could send their case straight to a Supreme Court that’s been generally supportive of gun rights.
The gravesite of J.R. Gustafson in Mount Pleasant, Pa.
Shortly after Easter this year, J.R. Gustafson’s gravesite in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, was decorated with colored plastic eggs and a stuffed bunny, placed beneath a photo of him embedded in the headstone.
Ordered by a judge to avoid the town as a condition of his release, Burnsworth, now 23, has since moved to another part of the state.
He knows he made a tremendous mistake when he pulled the trigger. But it’s a mistake hundreds of other people have made, too. Burnsworth believes that he could have just as easily been the one killed instead.
“I know it could have been any of us that day,” he said.
Methodology: For this investigation, NBC News attempted to quantify the number of accidental shooting deaths in which the person who fired the weapon believed it was unloaded because the magazine had been removed or disengaged.
Data on accidental shootings is limited. NBC News relied, in large part, on data the federal government began collecting from seven states in 2003 through the National Violent Death Reporting System. The most recent year of data available, from 2021, includes information on unintentional shootings from 48 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now receives this data from all 50 states, it does not receive data from every county, and local officials don’t always know or report the full details of shootings to state authorities.
To help fill in the gaps in federal data, NBC News relied on lawsuits, source interviews, news reports, and police reports to identify and confirm the 41 incidents that were not captured by the federal data. The research drew on independent sources such as the Gun Violence Archive, which compiles shooting data based on reports from media and local officials, and the Gun Accident Journal, a site created by attorney Gary Klein, to help identify incidents, which reporters then confirmed. The count excludes cases in which there was no evidence that the shooter believed the gun was unloaded, or where it was unclear that the shooting was accidental.
To analyze the prevalence of magazine disconnects in the current handgun market, NBC News relied on data from retail stores collected by the National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers, a trade group for firearms wholesalers and manufacturers, on handgun sales from July 2023 to June 2024. Reporters used owners manuals, technical specifications, and other manufacturer information to help determine whether the top-selling models had a magazine disconnect.
Suzy Khimm reported from Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Lewis Kamb reported from Seattle.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
