If you own a gun and keep it in your home, should you and everyone in that home actually know how to properly handle a weapon, should the weapon be stored safely away from children?

Yes, of course, obviously.

But the article does a great job of cataloguing situations where either some or all of that didn't occur, or someone just made a stupid, fatal mistake.

They were all instances where a fairly simple, well understood mechanical feature in firearms, a magazine disconnect, would have prevented those deaths.

... Some months back I got a bit of flack on a thread where some semi popular tiktoker game-overed himself by 'performing' to a song by pantomiming shooting himself in the head with his handgun.

He didn't drop out the mag, he didn't rack the slide, he apparently even could be seen switching the safety off.

I called him a Darwin Award winner, as, to me, someone with some actual firearms experience and training, this is a laughably stupid thing to do.

Would a mag disconnect have saved that guy's life?

No, but that isn't the point.

The point is that basically, any idiot can buy a firearm, and in all but 9 states, there isn't any actual legal requirement that you be trained in how to properly use, store, maintain, carry, etc said firearm.

https://everytownresearch.org/rankings/law/training-required-to-purchase-guns/

In most of the country, you can legally buy and possess many kinds of firearms without going through the certification for a CC permit, as long as you follow the local laws that apply when you don't have one.

This is not comparable to cars and drivers liscenses.

You need a liscense, and some level of insurance, to drive a car legally.

If we are not universally legally mandating firearm handling and safety training for everyone who lives in a home with a gun in it, I really do not think it would be that onerous of a burden on weapons manufacturers to include mag disconnects on applicable weapons produced from say the point from which some law regulating this is passed.

It would save lives, and it would cost a tiny amount.

Looking at this situation and just remarking 'wow those people were all foolish and/or their parents were foolish' is coming from a perspective that just assumes people who own guns either do or should have proper training and follow the practices from that training.

The reality is that many do not, and in 41 states, they don't even have to.

(Please do not come at me with your action hero movie scenarios where for some reason you need to be able to load single rounds into a chamber without a magazine and fire a gun.)