Item 4 Marking the National Rifle Association’s 2015 Freedom Festival in Nashville

Some truisms, even about guns, turn out to be true.

In January 2013, a security guard in Trinidad and Tobago accidentally shot off his penis with an illegal gun.

The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian reported that the 33-year-old man was carrying a .38 caliber handgun in his pocket when it went off, shooting him in the groin.

Police responding to a report of a gunshot coming from a parked car in the town of Rio Claro found the guard slumped over the wheel and bleeding from his groin. The man had a .38 caliber gun and had four rounds of ammunition in his pocket.

The guard was then transported to San Fernando General Hospital where he remained under police supervision. At the hospital police discovered the guard did not have an ownership license. Adding insult to already unpleasant injury the man is now expected to be charged with illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition.

Likewise, in August 2013, the Huffington Post reported that Geronimo Narciso, a truck driver in the Philippines, accidentally shot off his own penis and died before an ambulance could get him to the nearest hospital.

Narciso had apparently been drinking with friends, pulled his handgun out of the waistband of his pants, and fired several shots into the air. When he was pushing the gun back under his waistband, it apparently went off accidentally.

His family, however, asked that police investigate his death as a murder, asserting that he did not own a gun.

Lest anyone think that these accidents have been the result of inept weapons handling by “foreigners,” Brian Abrams, in response to the initial incident, wrote an article for the online magazine Death and Taxes. The article’s title was very straightforward–“At Least Five Americans Accidentally Shot of Their Penises since 2010.”

The complete article is available at: http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/193576/at-least-five-americans-accidentally-shot-off-their-penises-since-2010/

It is, of course, a very dubious proposition to attempt to reach any conclusions from such limited evidence. It may not be the case that Americans are more prone to this sort of accident than other peoples are but, instead, that our reporting of such accidents is simply much more thorough.