A 12-year-old girl was accidentally shot through the stomach during a Sunday gathering of the Three Percent of Idaho at a local gun range, according to the militia group’s president.
In a brief report about the incident, the Twin Falls Times-News noted that an unidentified girl was flown to a local hospital for treatment after being wounded at the Rupert Gun Range in Rupert, Idaho. She was in stable condition as of Monday morning, according to the report.
A Facebook post that appeared to be attributed to the president of Three Percent of Idaho, Brandon Curtiss, explained that the girl was a daughter of a militia member.
“One of our own is in need of much needed prayers and support,” Curtiss wrote in a post calling for donations to be sent to the girl’s family.
In Curtiss’ recounting, local Three Percent members headed to the outdoor gun range for target shooting after a Sunday afternoon group meeting (the militia outing went unmentioned in local reports). While cleaning a firearm, one of the members accidentally discharged the weapon, he said.
“The bullet hit the metal table under the canopy area and then ricocheted,” Curtiss wrote, saying the bullet struck the girl in the stomach before “exiting through her side.”
Curtiss did not immediately respond to TPM’s request for comment.
Neither news outlets nor Curtiss mentioned who fired the weapon, though local TV station KTVB reported that investigators who reviewed video of the incident concluded that it was an “accident.” The county prosecutor is still reviewing the tape to determine if a crime was committed, according to the news station.
The Three Percenters are Second Amendment advocates who take their name from the unproven statistic that only three percent of American colonists actively took up arms against England during the Revolutionary War. The group recently made headlines in connection with the armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
In January, Curtiss told TPM that he was working as an unofficial mediator between the leader of the refuge takeover, Ammon Bundy, and authorities who were monitoring the occupation. Curtiss has been an ally of the Bundys since 2014, when he and other Three Percenters participated in patriarch Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the Bureau of Land Management over his failure to pay grazing fees on federal lands.
In January, Ammon Bundy told the Associated Press that Three Percenters were providing security for the group occupying the Oregon refuge in order “to make sure nothing stupid happens.”
h/t Raw Story
