Dog Accidentally Shoots Passerby with Shotgun in Nebraska

Police investigating a gunshot incident in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, discovered that the gunman in question was not, in fact, a man, but a dog that had accidentally pulled the trigger, injuring a passerby, local news has reported.

Officers were called to a store on Saturday and informed that someone had been shot by a shotgun, local news outlet KNOP reported. Upon arrival, they found a pickup truck with one of its doors blown out, suggesting that the weapon had been fired from inside the truck.

They discovered that the owner of the truck had left his dog in the backseat as he went into the store. The dog had moved from one side of the seat to the other, catching its paw on the trigger of a loaded shotgun. The blast ripped through the skin of the vehicle, and one pellet struck a woman sitting at a nearby traffic light with her arm hanging out the window of her vehicle.

The woman was taken to a hospital and treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

It is unclear whether the dog’s owner has been charged with a crime. However, the Scottsbluff Police Department warned Nebraska residents that it is illegal to travel with a loaded firearm in a vehicle.

Last November, a Pennsylvania man was seriously injured when his dog jumped onto his bed and set off a shotgun that lay loaded on the mattress with its safety off.

Six months earlier, a similar incident took place in Memphis, Tennessee, when a pitbull terrier jumped onto his owner’s bed as he and his girlfriend lay there with a loaded firearm. The dog’s paw got stuck in the weapon’s trigger guard, police said, causing the gun to fire and a bullet to graze the man’s thigh.

In Kansas in 2023, a dog in the back seat of a pickup truck accidentally triggered a loaded rifle and fatally shot a man in the back.