Gun Safety

[PepperElf]

Well my nephew has a new toy "gun" - some kind of nerf rifle. He wants to show it to me, but probably doesn't realize I know more about it than he does.

So tomorrow I'll probably mention "Treat Never Keep Keep" to him... The 4 basic safety rules for firearms.

* Treat every, weapon as if it were loaded:

* Never point your weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot;

* Keep your finger straight and off the trigger until you are ready to fire;

* Keep your weapon on sate until you intend to fire.


but....what i know I won't show him is this... The first thing that popped up online when I googled "Treat never keep keep".
(cos he's only 6 and this *would* give him nightmares)

How I shot a friend

[One-Fang]

That's a sad tale. I can see it happening though. No amount of boot camp and being "a serious marine now" can take the teenager out of some young men. Some young people do think that being "safety conscious" (not just guns, in general) is lame and embarassing, and play stupid games with dangerous things. Sometimes it ends in tragedy. If only these stories were more out there, to show every young person who thinks fooling around with stupid stuff is "fun" and "nothing will happen" that yes, sometimes things actually do happen.

Gotta say though, I know you didn't come up with it, but it's not a very effective reminder phrase. The actual words used are not the key words in each sentence. Keep? Keep what? If I'm a young gun user I might remember the four words and wonder "What was that second Keep for?" If I were creating such reminders myself, I would use "loaded, pointed, straight and safe". Catchy, especially with the alliteration at the end, and using key words so you really can't forget what they're for once you remember the phrase.

[Nyoibo]

My dad taught me one rule with a gun, never point it at anything you're not prepared to kill, not prepared to shoot, prepared to kill, it drummed the lesson home a whole lot better I think.

[Salted Grump]

When I was around Four (perhaps I was six; it's been at least 20 years since then), my dad took me out back to go groundhog hunting with him. This also served as a practical lesson, as he used a .257 rifle (Slightly larger than NATO-standard Assault rifle ammunition which is .223, or 5.56x45mm depending on locale (And yes, that's just two names for the same size of bullet))

Anyhow, at one point we saw a groundhog, which my dad subsequently shot (We live on a farm, and were allowed to shoot 'pest animals' such as groundhogs due to the risk to livestock's limbs), he then told me to walk over there, and to 'Find all the pieces'

As a rough sense of scale, a 40-pound groundhog is roughly considered a medium-size animal, and is approximately as thick in the body as a child from the age of Five to ten years. My dad fired one bullet, and all I could find were the hind legs of that groundhog, as the rest had been scattered in a rough Forty-degree arc in the direction of the bullet travel. When I walked back to my dad, who was less than ten feet away, he explained, gently, that guns are tools to be respected, and that, until I was older, he didn't want curious fingers to do anything stupid with them.

It was only last year that I found out the old fart had used a hollow-point bullet; normally he used semi-jacketed which would kill by physical shock, instead of turning it into Field salsa. However, his lessons have stuck with me, and in a rather practical (and visceral) manner for the rest of my life.

And yes; I do take potshots at paper targets once or twice a year with my old .22L Rifle. I just follow ALL the rules of firearm safety while doing so.

[SteverinoNY]

I know all about gun safety. I was on the target shooting team in my high school (we were a military school and every student had to take a course in firearm safety even if they had no intentions of ever firing a weapon) and the range manager at the range we shot at was a huge stickler for range and weapon safety. No one was to go down range unless the weapons were empty and pointed away from the rifle range. He ensured this by collecting the weapons when the particular round of practice was finished and personally emptying them. He then would collect the targets, score them, and set up fresh targets.

Now on to my story of weapons stupidity. We were at range practice one day and one particular member of the team decided he didn't need to wait for the range manager to give the all clear signal and went down to get his target. One of the other members of the team was lining up a shot as the person who couldnt wait was walking down range. The person who was shooting happened to see the person down range, but had already taken the shot and sent the round down range (missing the target), but it bounced off the ground and grazed the person down range. The shooter who couldnt wait was kicked off the team (after he was checked out by the paramedics, bandaged up, and sent home), while the person who took the actual shot was shaken up and wound up quitting the team.

Yes it is the responsibility of the shooter to ensure everyone is using the range safely, but it is also important to follow the rules of the range because they are there to KEEP YOU SAFE!