These gun owners thought they were shooting an intruder. They were wrong.
As the national conversation on gun violence comes to a head, 63 percent of gun owners maintain they keep guns for self defense. Others point out times the "good guy with a gun" argument went wrong.
A new story from BuzzFeed News looks at those times.
Since 2015, at least 47 people have been shot by someone who mistook them for an intruder, per an analysis by BuzzFeed News and gun violence-focused newsroom The Trace. The victims were actually family members, friends, or emergency responders — and 15 of them died.
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BuzzFeed News turned four of these stories into a harrowing Twitter thread describing the moment each shooter realized what they'd done, like this snippet of Alexis Bukrym's story:
Bukrym's story continues, describing how she learned gun safety as a child and kept a handgun under her pillow while living with the roommate she shot. She knew about the risk of an accident, but her roommate didn't have a gun, and it seemed worth the risk to protect them both.
Read the rest of the story — including Bukrym's views on guns after the accident — at BuzzFeed News.
