Death from an excess of testosterone

I thought Navy SEALs were the pick of the Darwinian litter. But here’s a SEAL who’s won the Darwin Award. Showing off to a woman he had picked up in bar, Petty Officer 3rd Class Gene Clayont, Jr. put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, thinking it was empty. It wasn’t, and he’s dead.

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January 9

LA writes:

Sorry, but I can’t resist a paraphrase. The title of the entry triggers this:

And what if excess of testosterone
Bewildered him till he died?

That’s based on Yeats’s “Easter 1916”:

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?

Paul K. writes:

When someone puts a supposedly empty gun to his head and pulls the trigger, as this SEAL did, I suspect that on some level he wanted to kill himself. Granted there are idiots out there who occasionally do this sort of thing, but idiots don’t make it into the SEALs. Gene Clayont, Jr. surely have been familiar with the Four Rules of gun safety as formulated by Col. Jeff Cooper:

1. All guns are always loaded. Even if they are not, treat them as if they are.

2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. (For those who insist that this particular gun is unloaded, see Rule 1.)

3. Keep your finger off the trigger till your sights are on the target. This is the Golden Rule. Its violation is directly responsible for about 60 percent of inadvertent discharges.

4. Identify your target, and what is behind it. Never shoot at anything that you have not positively identified.

In order to have a calamitous accident, you have to ignore two of these rules. Clayont ignored numbers one and two.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 08, 2012 07:44 PM | Send