How did the gun fire without being cocked? ...
Putting his hand over the muzzle of a loaded gun was the problem.
Muzzle control means keeping the muzzle away from yourself as well as others.
I don't know why the gun fired, other than operator errors.
There were the following fundamental errors, IMHO:
1. The gun was not unloaded when it should have been.
2. The operator's hand was over the muzzle.
3. The gun was not treated as loaded.
As to exactly why the gun went off, no one knows. It could have been that the hammer was cocked and the trigger tripped somehow, or that it was uncocked but then cocked and fired by brushing against something when being used as a pushpole, or that the face of the striker was pushed into the primer by an outside object. It doesn't really matter, though. It should have not been loaded.
I can see, as rational and even safe, using a gun as a pushpole or a crutch when in the situation that operator found himself in. But
only if unloaded. Remember, he was snowshoeing and the snow underneath him turned out to be exceptionally loose (b/c it was over a beaver pond or similar ground which leads to loose snow) and he went off his snowshoes when the snow gave under his weight. He was in snow over his head and not over his snowshoes. And getting soaked in a beaver pond when you're a mile or two from your truck and twenty miles or so from town and it's winter in Maine is something you want to avoid. What first comes to mind in that situation is to get back on your feet without getting (too) wet. I think the excitement of the moment took precedence over cool thinking. Thus, an implicit violation of "safety first all the time" and "Don't hurry - no number of seconds saved are worth an accident".
The first thing he should have done, IMHO
before he started snowshoeing into what he
thought was a clearing in the woods, was break the gun and unload. (I left out of the telling earlier, that he told me his dogs were on a hare but some distance away. Thus, an implicit violation of another principle: "no shot at game is worth an accident".)
I've had a similar thing happen while on snowshoes: if you get too close to a tree's trunk, particularly in a thicket, you'll find the snow is often quite loose and your snowshoes will sink in, even though the snow's top is no higher - or even a little lower - than the rest of the snow. When it happened to me I wound up on my back in about 4 feet of snow, debating whether to take off the snowshoes as a way of getting out
while I was unloading the gun. To address that problem, I carry a couple of ski poles while snowshoeing and use them, and will sling the shotgun until I come across some hare sign. After I unloaded my gun, I set it aside in the crook of an adjacent sapling, and only then turned my attention to getting off my back and out of the snow. And then, once I was back on my feet and regained my composure, I checked the gun and assembled the ramrod in my game bag so I could clean out the snow in the right barrel.
And only when everything was squared away did I even think about reloading and continuing.
To be fair, he found himself in a complicated situation that even the most advanced course in hunter safety might not have addressed. There werea series of subtle safety traps that he missed. If he had caught any of them, he could have avoided the accident. But he still should have unloaded his gun, first, before trying to get out of the situation.
