Tennessee man shot by his dog while lying in bed

Dog bites man is hardly news, but in Tennessee, a dog recently shot a man.

In what is only the latest instance of a kind of accidental shooting that intermittently occurs in the US, Jerald Kirkwood reported to police in Memphis that he and a woman were lying in bed with a firearm when his dog jumped up and inadvertently caused the weapon to discharge.

A bullet grazed the man atop his left thigh, according to the local news station WREG, which cited police. WREG recounted how Kirkwood’s one-year-old pit bull, Oreo, had gotten his paw stuck in the trigger guard of his owner’s gun. Oreo ultimately squeezed the trigger and shot his owner, whom the station and multiple other news outlets identified.

The woman accompanying Kirkwood and Oreo reportedly left the home where the shooting occurred and took the gun with her while the wounded man was brought to a hospital in non-critical condition.

Memphis’s Fox 13 news station said it later spoke to the woman, who described to the outlet how Oreo “is a playful dog, and he likes to jump around and stuff like that, and it just went off”.

Asked whether she woke up because Oreo jumped on the bed or because her companion was shot, the woman told Fox 13: “The gunshot. Yeah, a combination of the two.” Oreo’s owner and the woman – whom the station agreed not to name in its coverage – reportedly said they would be sure to engage the safeties of any guns in their home moving forward.

“Keep the safety on or use a trigger lock,” the woman said after the shooting, which police classified as an accidental injury requiring no action against Oreo or his owner, according to Fox 13.

The non-profit Brady: United Against Gun Violence has found that – since 2019 – unintentional firearm injury has been the most common type of gun injury requiring hospitalization in the US, where laws governing access to firearms are notoriously lax when contrasted with those of other advanced democracies.

Meanwhile, a 2018 study on global firearm ownership estimated that civilian-owned guns in the US outnumber people, with the population exceeding 340 million.

Kirkwood is not the only person to have been shot by a pet.

Richard Remme of Fort Dodge, Iowa, reported in 2018 being shot in one of his legs with a gun that he had tucked into his waistband while roughhousing with his pit bull-labrador mix, Balew.

And in 2019, former Louisiana State University football player Matt Branch publicly discussed how his black labrador retriever stepped on a hunting shotgun that had been placed in the back of a utility terrain vehicle on a hunting trip in Mississippi.

The shotgun fired, striking Branch in one of his legs. Branch’s leg was subsequently amputated. He spent 12 days unconscious but survived the ordeal.

Branch, who was ultimately fitted with a titanium prosthetic leg, began walking again, returned to work and resolved to continue hunting.

“I was happy to be alive rather than mad I lost my leg,” Branch told Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger.