PLAYING WITH FIREARMS.

Evening Post, Volume XII, Issue 8, 9 July 1875, Page 3

PLAYING WITH FIREARMS.

A London paper records a most sensational incident which happened at the Marylebone Police Court, affording one more example of the danger of meddling with firearms on the supposition that they are not loaded. A half or wholly insane gentleman attended before Mr. Knox to complain that his wife had threatened to shoot him. The wife said that in order to make her husband desist from threatening violence she had, indeed, taken a revolver out of a drawer in which it had lam for sixteen years, but that she believed the weapon was not loaded. To confirm her account of the innocence of her intention, the revolver was handed to Mr. Knox, and the Magistrate, after examining it, aud pulling the trigger, observed that it was not loaded. He was proceeding with the case, when he again took up' the revolver, and was playing with it rather than testing it, when a loud report was heard, and a bullet went right through the chair which the clerk had quitted but two minutes before, and, rebounding, passed close to Mr. Knox's head. This time the weapon was sent to be examined by a more competent hand, and in the result it was found to be loaded with three rusty bullets, which had probably lain in the chambers for twenty years. Nothing is said in the account as to the state of Mr. Knox's feelings, but it is whispered that when the business of the day was over, and the public and the reporters had left the Court, he sought the look-ing-glass in his private room, and thus addressed the image he found there: — "You have this day afforded a sad example of an almost criminal carelessness, and, if it were not for your past good character and my knowledge of the respectability of your family, 1 should feel it my duty to commit you. Instead of pointing out to the woman that under no circumstances of supposed certainty is a fire-arm to be considered empty when there are people in the way : instead of impressing this lesson upon her by your own care in avoiding the touch of an explosive weapon, yon played with a revolver until nothing but the favor of Providence prevented you from taking the life of a clerk, and inflicting, serious injury on a worthy Magistrate sitting on the Bench of ' Justice above him. Such follyi hardly to be excused in a child, is in the highest degree repre-hensible-in a person of mature age ; and if it should lead to a lasting shyness on the part of the clerk— who for the future can never be certain what mischief may not be preparing for him behind his back — you will only be rightly punished. ' You may now stand down, but I warn you that the next time I have to speak to you on thiß subject it will be in a different strain."