Make sure of your backstop. Some guy in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn was shooting at sharks, using the Belt Parkway as a backstop and the inevitable happened.
I remember seeing a story on City Confidential (iirc) where a young man was killed by a shot “out of nowhere”. Turned out some idiot was playing Rambo at a nearby shooting range and fire wildly over the backstop and killed the poor guy.
BTW, I am not sure that it was an accident, he might have been tempted to see if he could hit a moving target a mile and a half away. Who in the Hell “cleans” a gun by firing it?
I clear my gun by firing it into a target. Or a deer. Or, if none are available, I will dump water down the barrel of my muzzleloader with a turkey baster until it comes out the nipple in a black slushy ooze.......firing it over the trees is reprehensible and preventable. He should be charged with manslaughter.
Only people who shoot black powder firearms.
The gun MUST be fired before the bore can be cleaned...a messy operation.
Maybe not for a modern muzzle loader but that surely was the way to clear (not clean) a flintlock back in 1775. Paul Revere used that fact to help spook the British while they were interrogating him. During the questioning, shots could be heard and when asked about their meaning, Revere convinced his captor, Major Mitchel of the 5th Regiment, that the countryside was being alarmed [every Middlesex village and farm]. It was actually the arriving militia clearing their firearms before entering Buckman Tavern on Lexington Green.
That bit of history does not absolve this modern-day shooter of the crime of negligent homicide, however