The flipside of this, which I have also often encountered:
Rabidly anti-gun people who get their hands on, or get near one, and have less than 0 conception of how proper gun safety works, will sweep the fuck out of everyone, with their finger in/on the trigger…
… Or, will be utterly terrified when you do a proper unloading/check of the weapon, with it pointed in a safe direction, screaming at or even shoving you while you do this.
There’s plenty of very immediate and practical stupid all the way around the sociopolitical spectrum when it comes to guns, it just comes in different flavors.
Yep. From memory:
Rule 1 of guns: never point it at anything you don’t want to shoot.
Rule 2: treat all guns like they’re loaded
Rule 3: if you are going to shoot something, make sure you’re ok shooting whatever is behind that thing. Don’t shoot over hills or other places where you can’t see where the bullet might end up.
I’m glad I got early gun safety training. Guns aren’t scary to me, they’re just tools. People I don’t trust with guns are frigging terrifying.
Yep, only minor modification is that the version of Rule 1 I was taught… not ‘shoot’, instead, ‘destroy’.
Connotes more damage and seriousness than… well, thanks to Hollywood/Video Games, if you’re the main character or otherwise have plot armor, you can probably just shrug off a few 9mm or 5.56mm rounds, right?
I guess also the uh, rider to Rule 2 was/is:
… unless you, personally, have properly verified that the gun is not loaded, recently.
And then after that was about an hour and a half of, ok, here are a bunch of different kinds of guns with different actions, heres some snap caps, lets show you how to actually do that.
Bolt actions, dropblocks, lever actions, pump actions, swing out revolver, semi auto pistol, semi auto rifle.
… I guess we ‘missed’ belt fed mgs, rofl.
EDIT
And yeah, rule 3 is one a lot of people tend to forget or rationalize into not being worth considering.
Rule 3 is like… here’s why a semi auto rifle is probably a terrible home defense weapon, especially if you live in an apartment… stick with maybe bird shot or a 9mm? Even 9mm can pen most American internal walls if it misses a stud.
But also, Rule 3 is basically why firing any kind of a warning, or simply errant shot in a populated area just is a crime. (well, or at least a misdemeanor, ymmv, consult local gun laws, etc)
Bullets fired straight up come down somewhere, people and things have been injured and ‘destroyed’ by this, and an angled shot at concrete or asphalt has a decent chance of either ricocheting away into god knows what (or who), or just basically deconstructing, splintering, ‘splattering’ into a bunch of fragments with unpredictable trajectories.
Yep. Rule 3 was really hammered home in my hunter’s safety course (one of many courses at a free 2-week summer camp i went to each year, which was put on by my state’s Fish and Wildlife department). We’d have the lecture, a written test, then a field test. The field test, they’d take us in groups of about 5 out on a trail and ask us if it would be ok to shoot at various targets. Most of the time it’d be “no”. The target would be past a no-hunting sign, or at the top of a hill, or similar. It forced you to think about your surroundings. I think we also carried wooden fake rifles, so the instructor could see if we pointed them at anything.
(Other courses included first aid, local critters, boating safety, fishing, swimming, and archery.)
Yeah…
The flipside of this, which I have also often encountered:
Rabidly anti-gun people who get their hands on, or get near one, and have less than 0 conception of how proper gun safety works, will sweep the fuck out of everyone, with their finger in/on the trigger…
… Or, will be utterly terrified when you do a proper unloading/check of the weapon, with it pointed in a safe direction, screaming at or even shoving you while you do this.
There’s plenty of very immediate and practical stupid all the way around the sociopolitical spectrum when it comes to guns, it just comes in different flavors.
Yep. From memory: Rule 1 of guns: never point it at anything you don’t want to shoot.
Rule 2: treat all guns like they’re loaded
Rule 3: if you are going to shoot something, make sure you’re ok shooting whatever is behind that thing. Don’t shoot over hills or other places where you can’t see where the bullet might end up.
I’m glad I got early gun safety training. Guns aren’t scary to me, they’re just tools. People I don’t trust with guns are frigging terrifying.
Yep, only minor modification is that the version of Rule 1 I was taught… not ‘shoot’, instead, ‘destroy’.
Connotes more damage and seriousness than… well, thanks to Hollywood/Video Games, if you’re the main character or otherwise have plot armor, you can probably just shrug off a few 9mm or 5.56mm rounds, right?
I guess also the uh, rider to Rule 2 was/is:
… unless you, personally, have properly verified that the gun is not loaded, recently.
And then after that was about an hour and a half of, ok, here are a bunch of different kinds of guns with different actions, heres some snap caps, lets show you how to actually do that.
Bolt actions, dropblocks, lever actions, pump actions, swing out revolver, semi auto pistol, semi auto rifle.
… I guess we ‘missed’ belt fed mgs, rofl.
EDIT
And yeah, rule 3 is one a lot of people tend to forget or rationalize into not being worth considering.
Rule 3 is like… here’s why a semi auto rifle is probably a terrible home defense weapon, especially if you live in an apartment… stick with maybe bird shot or a 9mm? Even 9mm can pen most American internal walls if it misses a stud.
But also, Rule 3 is basically why firing any kind of a warning, or simply errant shot in a populated area just is a crime. (well, or at least a misdemeanor, ymmv, consult local gun laws, etc)
Bullets fired straight up come down somewhere, people and things have been injured and ‘destroyed’ by this, and an angled shot at concrete or asphalt has a decent chance of either ricocheting away into god knows what (or who), or just basically deconstructing, splintering, ‘splattering’ into a bunch of fragments with unpredictable trajectories.
Yep. Rule 3 was really hammered home in my hunter’s safety course (one of many courses at a free 2-week summer camp i went to each year, which was put on by my state’s Fish and Wildlife department). We’d have the lecture, a written test, then a field test. The field test, they’d take us in groups of about 5 out on a trail and ask us if it would be ok to shoot at various targets. Most of the time it’d be “no”. The target would be past a no-hunting sign, or at the top of a hill, or similar. It forced you to think about your surroundings. I think we also carried wooden fake rifles, so the instructor could see if we pointed them at anything.
(Other courses included first aid, local critters, boating safety, fishing, swimming, and archery.)