Gun Safety
Regarding whether or not it’s OK to take photos of violations of gun safety, Bitter says:
There are no exceptions when it’s a functional firearm. Even before I became an instructor, I refused to break those rules, even for photographers. When I would come across one that would even make a request for me to break a rule, I would immediately ask them to leave the range and refuse permission to use my image in any way.
If we did that, we wouldn’t have any Bruce Willis movies. I was going to list the ways I personally have violated the four rules of gun safety but Standard Mischief did the work for me in comments:
Who here has not checked the condition of a barrel’s lands and grooves by first verifying that the firearm is unloaded, locking open the action, inserting a finger or a white piece of paper such that light is reflected inside, and sighting down the barrel from the muzzle? Are you not violating rule #2?
How about pointing a gun at your living room floor? I’m pretty sure that’s something that most people are not willing to destroy, although frequently it’s voted as the safest surface to discharge a round into. Usually the floor beats out the TV, the computer, your domestic partner, or that Ming vase on the table over there. It even usually beats out the ceiling, because with a hole in the floor, you don’t have to rush and patch it.
Likewise, waiting to shoot at clays, have you ever seen anyone rest a double shotgun, action broken open, over their shoulder? Aren’t they being a bit careless? I mean they’re not even watching where the muzzle is pointing at, they’ve got their back turned. Another violation of rule #2?
Does dry fire practice violate #3?
Am I being careless when I have the bolt out of the action of my Mauser, and I’ve verified that I can see the follower, and I have the gun clamped down and I’m swabbing out the barrel and just for one brief moment I assume that the gun is not loaded, contrary to rule #1?
I like to hope I’m a safe gun handler. I make sure everyone is following the rules when I’m the range safety officer. I don’t let the nieces or nephews handle firearms until they correctly answer the question “what is the first thing you do when you pick up a firearm?”. I teach them to keep their finger off the trigger and keep the gun unloaded and pointed down range until it’s their turn to shoot.
I teach the four rules. But I realize I violate the rules all the time. And I realize that it would be impossible to rewrite the four rules such that I never violate them, yet still retain their simplicity.
And while practicing the Wile E. Coyote school of gunsmithing, you simply can’t follow all the rules while working on a weapon or bore-sighting or installing a scope or hitting it with a really big hammer or using a Dremel to widen the magazine well of an AK variant. There are exceptions out there but they are necessary exceptions.
November 17th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Okay, don’t have time for a response right now. Of course you guys would do this on an unusually busy Friday. Last night when I was at home and had a case of insomnia wouldn’t do it for ya, huh? :p
November 17th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Yeah, but doing any of those things outside of the gun community should be frowned upon.
November 17th, 2006 at 11:04 am
I was going to come back and add something like that, Rustmeister for a quick response. Standard Mischief didn’t bother responding to the PR element of my argument, which is a core part of it. While you can get away with quite a bit with your fellow gun nuts, few think beyond that to what some fence sitter who could possibly be persuaded to either remain neutral or come to our side would think if they witnessed such behavior. Considering my focus is bringing more of those harder to reach groups into the shooting sports and my background is in studying media and how it has either helped or hurt social movements, the PR aspect, whether it’s to big media or a new shooter, is one that I feel shouldn’t be ignored.
November 17th, 2006 at 11:38 am
That’s interesting.
I’ve always thought of it as a logical conditioner. “All guns are loaded” means that guns are, by definition, loaded. As Cooper himself noted, there is no reason to think of a gun as being unloaded, or even consider having an unloaded gun around. When unloaded, it’s not a gun.
We also attempt to follow the other rules when messing around with a gun-shaped lump of metal and wood, simply because it’s good practice, of course – that’s true whether we’re talking a Kimber 1911 or a Tokyo Marui airsoft pistol. And we check if a lump is loaded whenever it could possibly be loaded because we need to know if we have a gun on our hands.
Admittedly, I’m more a knife nut, and I know this isn’t how Cooper thought of the material (since he wasn’t proud of the pictures of himself pointing a gun at a camera), but it seems an effective way of working.
It still could be considered bad PR, but to be honest, they didn’t need a Lumpy to get a random image of a gun nut.
November 17th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
you say that like it’s a bad thing.
November 17th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
Bitter Says:
Rustmeister Says:
Maybe I should have added that I (now at least) never break the rules for the totally unbiased mainstream media. Because they lie. Because they distort. Because they take unflattering photographs of people they hate at inopportune moments like when they are coughing or straighting their tie and run them, repeatably. Because they think we don’t notice. Because other people probably don’t notice.
I understand this. But let me briefly tell you a story. I was a late blooming gun enthusiast. Around my 22nd birthday, a friend went over the four rules, showed me the negligent discharge hole in the ceiling drywall (with the date and some other guy’s name written and circled for posterity), and then immediately showed me how to lock open the action of a Garand, verify the chamber was empty and no clip was present, and preceded to showed me what a mint bore looks like.
Although that was all pretty cool, My brain was screaming Does Not Compute!
(shameless plug) Here’s another old gun safety blog entry.
November 17th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
You can call me Rusty. 😉
November 19th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
My essential problem, as illustrated in the posted violations of rules 2 and 3, is the implication that the human mind is not capable of knowing reality.
Let me tell you something: it is a fact that the Beretta on my desk is not loaded. I know this to a complete certainty. That is possible. To my mind, holding to a “rule” as in the topmost blockquoted section of this post is just as arbitrary and ridiculous as the hoplophobes whole side of life, and that includes the so-called “PR” aspects of it. To appeal to irrationality with irrationality is a howling irrationality.
November 19th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
It’s not so much that “all guns are always loaded”, though that is a handy way to remember and condition… it’s that one has to train themselves to accept that “loaded” is a default condition and “unloaded” is the exception; therefore any gun that is picked up is assumed loaded and the idea that it could be unloaded is the strange one.
I don’t accept things like bore-checking to be violations of the rules because in doing so you have something in the chamber (your finger, a piece of paper, or a borelight) that is not a fireable bullet, and the worst that could happen is you tap the butt of the AR on something and the finicky bolt release disengages with your pinky finger in the chamber. Or something like that *looks around nervously*.
Dry firing makes me paranoid and nervous though, and it should, but I do it anyways and take the heightened alert level as a measure of safety. If I didn’t do it, I’d be an absolutely lousy shot, because I get to actually shoot much more rarely than you’d think one who works in a gun shop/range would.