Just curious as to what everybody's take is on what constitutes a Negligent Discharge (ND) vs. what constitutes an Accidental Discharge (AD.)

In my opinion, 99.99% of unintended discharges are ND's, and could be avoided by simply keeping your ratzafrackin' finger away from the trigger until you are ready to fire your weapon. Period. End of story. But let's say you're setting your gun down on a shooting bench, and a slightly protruding nail catches the trigger and discharges your weapon. AD? I think not. Why? Simple - the trigger is the mechanism that makes your gun go "boom." You must constantly mind what is in the vicinity of that mechanism, if you don't want your gun to go "boom."

So, what, then, constitutes an AD? In my opinion, these DO happen, but are very, very rare. An AD is when, due to some design malfunction, or broken part - a gun discharges without any manual manipulation of the trigger.

I think the vast majority of firearms related accidents could be averted, if only shooters were more aware of what's in the vicinity of the trigger, and practiced strict "muzzle discipline" (never allowing the muzzle of their weapon to cover anything or anybody they didn't want to shoot, even for a split second.)

What say you?

It's been my experience that when people are either talking or their minds are wondering and not concentrating on what's at hand that ND occur.....and it can happen to any of us.
I once judged a NRA Sanctioned Muzzleloader shoot in which time during the loading of their rifles this one particular fella was jabbering away...at one point he double loaded his gun and fired but later that day when he was shooting the 200 yard range competition I saw something unusual. Talking away as usual I saw something fly down range of the fireing line toward the targets........it was his ramrod. With all this distraction he forgot to remove it from the barrel. Then after the shot he accused someone of taking is his ramrod and pointing fingers.....it wasn't untill I came down to the line and suggested he check the target boards during the next cease fire......he did and that quited him for the rest of the day.
Concentration on practice and procedure  in handling will keep these type of incidents to a minimum.

Being a safety professional, I STRONGLY subscribe to the thought that there is no such thing as an accident.  Everything is caused, intentionally or otherwise.  As such, I rarely use the word and instead use the word incident.  I think it is a much better descriptor of what occurred.

Big Mickey and Dave49 are right in their analyses. When investigating industrial accidents (in a past position) we used the terms "avoidable" and "unavoidable". Findings were that in most cases the accident (unplanned incident) was avoidable. There were very few unavoidable. Proper training and alertness had to be exercised, whether in a sheet metal factory or in making gauze pads for medical use (or on the firing line).

Thank you Steve !

I didn't do the banning. Bruce did.
I just made the announcement, that's all.