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…as whimsically pointed out in Trust Isn’t Transitive by Peter N Biddle, just because someone can fly a 747 doesn�t mean they can be trusted to carry a handgun. And though I might buy a book from someone with a good reputation rating on Amazon, tha…

That was more or less what I hoped you would say. Basically that yes, there was a slight misunderstanding based on language.
There is no activity in the world that is completely free from risk, however this makes you the first person that I have been in conversation with to express the idea of systemic closures of failure modality’s via incident analysis, in relation to firearms, or the associated “over-learning” in training of skills and procedures to come out of this analysis.

It is somewhat heartening to hear.

I think that you are personalizing my general statement by referring to a specific air crash, rather than their possibility.

No air crash should be considered acceptable, but the possibility of any one of them must be.

If someone told me to make air crashes impossible, I’d say “ground every plane, remove their engines, and bulldoze furrows across every airfield”.

But that still wouldn’t make them impossible, because somebody somewhere has an old Otter sitting in a barn beside a lake in Wisconsin, and that plane can, with a little tinkering, still take off, which means it can still crash…

Rather than try to prevent this plane from crashing by trying to keep it from ever taking off, we choose instead to try to make sure that when it does take off, the chances of it crashing are lower than they were before the last air crash. We try to get better every time.

The same should hold true, generally speaking, for ND’s and guns. Hopefully people somewhere are reviewing every aspect of this ND and figuring out how to make the chances of another one lower.

As a pilot, ( albeit as such a low hour pilot) , I DO NOT consider an air-crash as acceptable. I accept that they will happen, but believe that they should be investigated with a view to modifying the system ( be it via engineering, procedures, training or any other means) to prevent a repeat performance.

I would also expect a similar attitude towards firearm safety. Why are ND’s considered “unfortunate, but acceptable”.

I also wonder if this is partly a language issue, but I am conscious of the fact that sods law can be repetitive if needed. ( I believe in the ’states you call it “Murphy’s law”, which has a different but similar meaning where I live)