Have you ever had to check to see if a muzzle loading firearm was loaded? If you haven't, it's not that hard.
First you make sure that it's not primed or cocked, and then you drop a long dowel down the muzzle, and mark it at the crown. Then pull it out and hold it alongside the barrel with the mark even with the muzzle end. If the other end of the rod doesn't come even with the breech end, there's a powder charge and a projectile in there.
It's obviously easier with revolvers, whether cartridge or cap 'n' ball, since you can observe the contents of the chambers directly.
When self-loading pistols were first introduced, a lot of thought went into various ways to ascertain the chamber's status without having to cycle the action. Many early autos, like the Luger, had extractors that doubled as visual/tactile loaded chamber indicators.
Savage's Model 1907 pocket auto originally had a clip that encircled the breech, shaped kind of like a pocket clip on some pens, with a tab that extended rearward and would be forced outward by the rim of a chambered round.
Later models dispensed with it, as it required separate machining steps to both the barrel and slide, added an extra part, and could tie up the slide if the finger-like indicator tab were to break off.
Besides, loaded chamber indicators are very much a "trust but verify" sort of thing, as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather check the chamber manually regardless.
Apparently two workers were swept off their feet by a wall of water that roared through the pipe in which they were working, but one was wearing a safety harness and didn't wind up...er, up shit creek, as it were, like his coworker.
Whether you are an instructor yourself (and I'm not) or just a frequent student, it's worth a read.
I like that he draws the distinction between someone who is unsafe due to fatigue or medical reasons and someone who is having a hard time with following the safety rules.
If you're a student, I think it's kinda incumbent on you to also keep an eye on your own performance. I've pulled myself off the line a couple times when I noticed that I'd reached a level of fatigue or dehydration that was reducing my ability to focus enough to cause me concern.
Hey, do you have kids or grandkids (or know someone with kids or grandkids) who could use a book about firearms safety?
Yehuda Remer is a nice dude and he's got a little children's book called Safety On: An Introduction to the World of Firearms for Children which is all about how a kid learns about safe gun handling, storage, and ownership from his dad. It's charmingly illustrated and an easy read for a young elementary schooler.
I've long practiced the habit of keeping "sterile" bags that I use as airline carryons. These bags never get used for gun stuff and, on the occasionally unavoidable trip to the range with one of the camera bags, they get thoroughly emptied and manually searched for even stray spent shell casings before being used for carryon duty again.
This is intended to prevent accidental good-faith "whoopsies" like turning up at the TSA checkpoint with that pocket knife, loaded magazine, or even...God forbid...that little pocket pistol I hadn't seen in a while reappearing by surprise in a little-used side pouch.
I recommend this practice to other people, too, but that presumes that they're actually making a good faith effort to not accidentally bring a gun on the plane.
On the other hand you've got dudes trying to sneak guns in all kinds of improvised hiding places in order to avoid having to check a bag...or smuggle a pistol to a foreign destination.
At the FN launch event where they showcased the High Power earlier this year, FN America's head of LE training was helping run the line. He caught sight of me repeatedly fiddling with the safety as I raised and lowered the pistol to my sight line and assumed he had to help a striker-fired shooter out. I had to explain to him that, no, I carried 1911s for years and was just getting a feel for the safety on the new High Power; I'm pretty religious about "On the sights, off safe. Off the sights, on safe."
Of course, that little mnemonic is simplistic, and safety use on a single-action defensive pistol is a little more complex than that.
My main carry gun for a decade. This picture should make you cringe a bit. "iT aIn'T lOw-DeD!"
Incidentally, this is one place where there is a very real difference of opinion between the proper employment of a single action pistol with a mechanical safety in action pistol shooting and for actual carry out where the targets will do more than disqualify you from the match if you crank off a round at the wrong time.
I'm just going to say that there are a lot of things that I am fine with you doing with a pistol if I'm standing behind you holding a timer that I would be a lot less cool with you doing if I were standing downrange of you as a Human No-Shoot.
Did you catch that? Some dudes grabbed some shoes from his shoe store and took off running. He ran out into the mall behind them and, realizing he wasn't going to catch them, just started blasting at the fleeing shoplifters. His bullets hit a little girl and put her in the hospital.
Luckily he didn't kill her, so he's only being charged with attempted murder instead of the whole enchilada, and frankly he deserves it. Any sympathy I had for dude evaporated when he threw down in the middle of the mall for no good reason.
Deadly force is only justifiable when there is the immediate, otherwise unavoidable, danger of death or great bodily harm to yourself or another innocent person.
Your house is not a free-fire zone. It is important to positively identify anything you are pointing your weapon at. If you're not willing to shoot it, you shouldn't be pointing a gun at it; that's right there in the basic safety rules. And if you don't know what (or who) it is, then how do you know if you're willing to shoot it or not?
Yes, you can search* and PID indoors quite adequately with a modern weapon-mounted light, one with good output and adequate spill, using good technique. If you do not know how to do that, use a handheld to avoid waving your blaster around and muzzling things... and people ...you shouldn't.
You don't even really need any special gear, though. Your house does have built-in room illumination, right?
Alternatively, you can use your Tactical Audible Target Identification Friend-or-Foe System, or T.A.T.I.F.F.S.
You know, the one where you say "Who's there?" with your mouth.
*Although, really, why are you searching? If you're that sure that someone's in the house, why not just fort up and call the po-po and let whoever's in the house know that you've done so?
Some poor kid in Italy had a fatal firearms accident while on a hunting trip, the nature of which is hard to figure out from the information at the linked article.
The Newsweek reporter, as part of her story, contacted the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, CSGV's sister org, for some quotes and got this whopper:
So don't come at me with that "one of the most common causes" nonsense. There are more than twice as many fatal accidents every year with skates and skateboards than there are with guns.
...there was no way I was going yesterday. I avoid ranges on the weekends on general principle, but avoiding them on the weekend right after Christmas is a hard and fast rule for me.
You know that Far Side cartoon? The one that goes something like "After 23 uneventful years at the reptile house, Dave had a cumulative attack of the willies", with the janitor all curled up and gibbering in the corner? Yeah, that'd be me at a public range yesterday.
Look, Alec, I get that you're absolutely gutted by this.
I could be convinced that you legitimately believe that you did not pull the trigger. Our brains... our egos... will tell us some amazing lies in order to protect our id. Even though I think you're a huge asshole, on some basic human to human level, I feel bad for you, because this is obviously a horrible experience.
But guns, and most specifically Colt Single Action Armies and their clones, do not work that way.
If it were some striker-fired semiauto, we could concoct some bizarre and cosmically unlikely hypothetical whereby the sear broke at the same time as the aliens from planet Zoltar beamed the firing pin safety out of the gun, but not on that smokewagon you were holding. You had to at least manually cock the hammer on that replica hogleg while pointing it at someone.
One thing I've noticed in his posts are the abandoned-looking buildings with the square placards on them, the ones in Albany have a white X on a red background.
I don't recollect seeing these in Indy, even though my trips downtown take me through neighborhoods with plenty of abandoned structures. I decided to look them up, and discovered it's from the International Fire Code and used pretty widely here in the US.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these signs are a bone of contention in some places.
They do give off a certain cyberpunk dystopian air, that's for sure, but maybe the neighborhood chamber of commerce might want to worry about why the signs are there in the first place. It's hard to make the argument that they're uglifying the decaying buildings in the 'hood.
I guess taking warning signs on vacant buildings down is what local politicians would rather do about the problem instead of something.
On one sunny Atlanta summer day back in June of 2000, I turned left off of Peachtree-Dunwoody Road onto Peachtree. Peachtree there is flat, straight, and six lanes wide.
I was the only eastbound vehicle, in the center of the three lanes, when the white Camry attempted a left-hand turn out of a driveway ahead there on the right.
I don't remember much of the rest of that day, except for fragments, and all of those are pretty awful. That was the end of my motorcycle, too. The guys at my bike shop took a look at the wadded wreckage and were amazed I'd lived. It had cartwheeled down the street rather farther than I had.
I talked with one of the responding officers by chance later that year, after I was out of the wheelchair. He told me that the driver, a Jordanian immigrant who'd come over to help his brother's computer business back in the tail end of the dot-com boom, was freaking out on the side of the road. He was sure the cops were going to send him to jail or, worse, take him to Hartsfield and park him on a plane that afternoon. They had to calm him down and explain that we have traffic accidents in America, too.
He did the right thing and admitted to Failure to Yield. I don't bear him any real animus, but I do wish he'd been paying a bit more attention that day. Let y'all who ain't never screwed up cast the first aspersion.
My life would have been a lot different if he'd paid attention.
Heck, it would have been different if I'd had change for the toll booth on GA-400 and didn't take the Medical Center exit or, for that matter, if I hadn't bought the Ruger Vaquero that day at my part time gun store gig and needed to swing by the apartment to drop it off before heading to my full time job at the Gwinnett airport.
Anyway...
There was a wreck here in the Indy metro earlier this year that drew a lot of press, because a young couple was killed on the way to prom, t-boned in their vehicle (in a stroke of horrific irony) by a classmate. The wreck happened on one of those board-flat, ruler-straight 2-lane county roads that crisscross corn country, with non-existent shoulders, 55mph speed limits, and intersected by smaller country lanes with stop signs and warnings that Cross Traffic Does Not Stop.
The police report came out and determined that the car that hit and killed the couple was likely exceeding the speed limit by as much as 25 mph. The police report also determined that the other contributing cause of the accident was the failure of the car that was struck to yield the right of way.
The kid who t-boned the vehicle isn't being charged with vehicular homicide because there's no such crime in Indiana. There's Reckless Homicide, but she wasn't doing anything that meets the statutory definition. She got a speeding ticket. The other driver should have gotten a ticket for Failure to Yield, but they're dead, like my Camry driver might have been if I'd been piloting a Suburban instead of a Suzuki.
Still, I watch these videos and I can't imagine having to explain to the grieving family and friends that we have accidents here in America, too.
The most dangerous gun handlers are the ones who think they’re too safe to worry about making a mistake.
As a community, we need to stop treating all accidental discharges as foolish and criminal acts. By placing every accident under the umbrella of sin, we do ourselves a disservice. We lose the chance to examine the details and learn from them. We lump the competitor who made a momentary transgression in with the idiot who’s never learned anything about safe gun handling. Worst of all, we create a mindset that tells us mistakes won’t happen to smart people (meaning, “us”) … which breeds complacency, which breeds more mistakes.
Bold & italics are in the original. It's worth a reading again refresher.
The thing that sets the tone for my opinion of a class & its instructor is the morning safety brief. There are industry best practices that are best practices for a reason, and straying from them is never a good idea.
You want to see the morning safety briefing done absolutely by the book? Craig Douglas's is the industry standard in my experience thus far.
