Rule Number One: All Guns are always loaded

[churchmouse]

 

[JettaKnight]

Hmm... The INGO signal for this is getting a little heated.

(going back a few pages and reading...)

Yup. Kind of figured that might happen when someone started personal insults started last night.


I'm done with this.

 

[ATM]

<wades through the corpses>

Hey, I'm back.



Any new items ripe for discussion?

 

[churchmouse]

Hmm... The INGO signal for this is getting a little heated.

(going back a few pages and reading...)

Yup. Kind of figured that might happen when someone started personal insults started last night.


I'm done with this.

Yeah the bat signal is broken.

 

[308jake]

<wades through the corpses>

Hey, I'm back.



Any new items ripe for discussion?

please disperse. There is nothing to see here.

 

[ATM]

please disperse. There is nothing to see here.

Should I pinky check my musket before I disperse or can I sqeeze off a shot?

 

[IndianaSoloMcfly]

So.. Guns are always loaded?

 

[308jake]

Should I pinky check my musket before I disperse or can I sqeeze off a shot?

It depends on how you define musket.

 

[fjw2]

Well, I might catch some flak for this, but here it goes anyway. I believe there should be a bare minimum of instruction involved with owning a firearm. I know, there will be those who say that would be an infringement. I appreciate living in Indiana in terms of the processes the state has in place regarding firearm ownership. They are not overly burdensome. My opinion has been long in forming. I see not only kids, but adults too, pointing the muzzle of the firearm they are checking out at the gun store at other people in the store. The store employees do not usually correct them. My guess is that they don't want to offend a potential customer. I get that. But my radar is up and running the second I step through the door for that sort of thing. I suppose it comes down to a case by case opportunity to educate the uneducated. Case in point. My wife and I were in a gun store in Nashville awhile back. She asked the person behind the counter to see a pistol they had. I was maybe eight feet away from her at the time. She did about everything you could imagine wrong just right then. I was by her side in a moment and quickly removed the pistol from her hands. I tried to downplay the situation as to not embarrass her. She is not always in the mood to talk about firearms in our daily life,but the next time she was I brought up that time. We spent a good deal of time discussing gun handling. Now she is at that next level where she will point out to me someone who is doing something wrong. I guess my point is that if is not going to be mandated by the state, it will fall to rest of us to educate the uneducated regarding firearms handling.

 

[308jake]

Kudos to you for having the courage to post your well thought out belief. That being said, may I suggest making this a thread of its own. This one is already full of tension, and I'm afraid that adding to it may elevate too many heart rates.

I do respectfully disagree though. I already view the ltch as an infringement upon my rights guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment, and making training a required prerequisite, further crosses the line. A citizen has rights where as a subject has mandates.

 

[ATM]

I'm not a teacher. I'm not even a Coope-rite per se. I'm an idealistic pragmatist. I find the mindset helpful. It doesn't cause me to treat firearms unsafely. The way you want to teach it, as long as it's helpful and not harmful? Teach it. So what? Other teachers who want to teach Cooper's rules, as long as it's helpful and not harmful? So what? And if you think it's not helpful and actually harmful, then prove it. Most people will listen to hard facts. I would.

I do believe it's harmful, hence my railing against it. It is not harmful to everyone, but likely many. Many is enough. A few would be enough. How about one? Yeah, the individual matters.

And, it doesn't keep anyone safe, the steps which follow do. There are many ways to prove it, many evidences which are not the data you suggest. If these aren't satisfactory for you, I'm not terribly worried. If you're interested in researching numbers and sorting out all the variables which would impact those numbers, shoring them up against attempted reproof from the faithful adherents, knock yourself out.

Consistently meeting these silly rants with "so what?" isn't squealing.

Your squeals haven't been the most delightful of the bunch, but better than average for one who claims to not even care.

The silly rants meet the loose definition of squealing much better. And, I don't care about how or what you teach. If it makes someone a better person than they were before, good for you. My only objection is every thread that touches on the subject gets jacked into this silly discussion about making people conform to your way. And, then all you offer as a reason to change is a facile argument along with some implicit ridicule.

I'm writing more for the readers than the respondents. It is generally how I accomplish things. Anyone who gets caught up in responding only to me and forgets about the larger group of readers will tend to lose ground in the larger battle.

oops. Probably shouldn't have told them that, but I'm feeling cocky. <---don't google that phrase on a Chinese server, btw.

The only foes in an argument over ideas is harmful ideas. The people who promote the ideas are not the foes. They are just people. People don't become foes until they mean to do physical harm. So there's no actual person to tip over here. Some of your rhetoric makes me think that was necessary to say.

Thanks for mentioning it and I certainly agree. I consider most people friends and have met many of the people I argue with here on INGO.
My goal is to tip the ideas, not the people. I can take snark and dish it as well, but my goal is generally to sway the audience of readers on a given topic, not to attack any individual.

On the OC/CC debates, I read through some of that but I wasn't involved. It mostly happened before I started posting regularly. The thing I objected to in that debate most is similar to what I object to here. An element of human nature that I've always found distasteful is that people seem to instinctively expect everyone to do things the same. I object to people trying to tell people how they must do stuff. If you don't think OC is a good idea. Don't OC. Same with CC. But don't sit here and tell people they must CC or OC.

That's where we are now, my task complete. It took a while.

Same for Cooper's rules, if you think rule #1 is unnecessary, don't teach it, don't follow it. If you find that rule is helpful, teach it, follow it. The only reason to tell people what they shouldn't do is if it's actually harmful. You've not shown that it is. And until you do, I'll continue to say so what?

I do think it's both unnecessary and harmful.

Since I haven't yet convinced you, I appreciate that you and some others have taken more of a 'so what?' stance rather than a defensive stance. I really wish the defensive few would actually point out errors or problems with what I say, make a logical defense for teaching people that ALL GUNS ARE ALWAYS LOADED rather than taking refutation of that 'rule' as a personal slight, selectively quoting their responses while evading the real gist of the discussion.

I don't care what they've adopted so long as they handle guns safely, but there are better and worse ways to instruct the next generation and that's worth discussing. I'm no fan of rote regurgitation for its own sake. Good and reasonable ideas can withstand quite a bit of directed scrutiny.

 

[ATM]

...I guess my point is that if is not going to be mandated by the state, it will fall to rest of us to educate the uneducated regarding firearms handling.

With this, I can agree. I do not want the state involved but I do feel obligated to educate those who are willing.

 

[ATM]

...To me, a parallel would be that if there's a rule "don't speed while driving", you're on a straight road without intersections or crossings, and you know for a fact that the only cop on duty is 15 miles away, if your sole reason not to speed is "I might get a ticket", and that possibility is presently moot, are you gonna speed? Probably. If, however, your reason not to speed is, "It's unsafe, because I never know what's going to unexpectedly be in the road", it doesn't matter if the cop is there or not, you aren't going to speed.
Likewise, if the reason you handle the gun safely is only because "it's loaded" and now you know it's not, you might be less diligent of, and shirk the responsibility to be aware of your hand position and muzzle direction..

<bold added>

Sorry you're not getting any discussion on this, Bill, and thanks for bringing it up from what I think most would consider a neutral and open-minded vantage point.

Such insights will likely continue to be avoided simply because they are not easily addressed.

If there is some advantage to teaching as a mindset or a rule that ALL GUNS ARE ALWAYS LOADED which overcomes this unintended but unavoidable side effect, I'd still love to hear it.

So far, the major plus to teaching it seems to be that it reminds people to check the loaded/unloaded status of a gun when they pick it up - nothing at all to do with actually handling a gun safely.

I also teach people how to load and unload guns, they are able to check, recheck and change its status at will. But, that's not tied to keeping it pointed in a safe direction or keeping their finger off the trigger. There is no 'until...'

What else does ALL GUNS ARE ALWAYS LOADED provide? Good, bad, necessary, unnecessary, what's the true appeal that causes such fervent adoption and loyalty from so many of those who memorized it? Is it just because it's easy to give as a response to any and all negligent acts?

Perhaps, but the easiest catch-all response is rarely the most appropriate. Often, it does nothing at all to address or correct the actual mistake or unsafe behavior. How uninstructive shall we remain in our responses?

How uninstructively shall we approach the challenge of educating people to be more successful in safely handling guns?

Where simple is effective, shall we make it complex?

Where tangible suffices, shall we make it abstract?



I know, I know. Good luck to me and my students.

 

[Bill of Rights]

Warning: Incoming Wall o' Text. Grab a sammich, if you want.

Perhaps the problem is that people in general do not like "change". Specifically, they learned four rules and those four served them well, in their experience, and I can say that because "they" includes "me".

One thing that may help is if we divorce the idea for the purpose of this discussion from the man who popularized it: Let's not call it "Cooper's Rule #1". Let's call it, for this discussion, "Traditional Rule #1". I know that's semantics, but my rationale is that people may be wrapped around the axle because there's an angelic choir singing when we invoke the name of Col. Cooper, along with a Heavenly Light... at least in some minds. That could be taken as sarcasm, and I'd like to clearly state none is intended. I don't take away from the man's brilliance and wisdom in any way.

Neutrality is, for me, a necessity if I want to evaluate things fairly. I try to distill things down to just the basic facts... for me, a swaying point is that if I'm following #2 and 3, you'll never know if I'm following #1 or not. While it's been clearly shown that one must break more than one of those traditional rules to cause damage to property or person,
if I keep my gun pointed only at things that I'm OK with being destroyed AND I keep things, specifically fingers, out of the trigger guard, the gun is not going to fire, absent a mechanical malfunction. Since that malfunction has nothing to do with how I handle the gun, it being loaded or not has no bearing.

Maybe another consideration is, as noted upthread, "you don't look down the barrel."

True. Why?

Is it because the gun is loaded, even when you've cleared the chamber?
Is it because you make a habit and don't ever break the practice that that habit necessitates?
Is it because you never point your gun at anything you don't want to destroy, and only the suicidal want to destroy their own heads?
Is it some other reason I've not thought of?

I have looked down the barrel, at least of my handguns. Of course, I've only done so either from the chamber end, with a mirror, or with the barrel removed from the gun itself. In honest reflection, I can say that my reason for that practice falls more to a "traditional rule #2" consideration than to anything having to do with rule #1. So why do I still give value to rule #1? For me, maybe it has to do with the debunked story of the monkey/banana/water hose experiment: That's how we've always done it. Is it bad advice? My answer would be a qualified no. It's not bad advice to tell people all guns are always loaded, but discernment, a quality that seems more lacking today than in years past, is needed for the new shooter to realize what that means.
The long answer is that the gun handler needs to respect the gun for what it is; a tool made to launch a projectile at high speed in a specific direction. Given what it is and what it does, knowing (via physics) what that projectile will do to anything with which it makes contact while at speed is important. Thus, with that known, and having seen the damage a GSW causes, it makes good sense to respect the tool for its potential. One tl;dr phrasing of that is the simplistic "Eez gon. Eez not sayfe", but even that can be torn apart: "But if I take all the boolitz out, it IS sayfe!"

I'm going to flatter myself for a moment and attempt to second-guess Cooper and others who invented the traditional Rule #1, and say that perhaps rather than "all guns are always loaded", a better rule might have been, "An unknown gun is loaded until proven otherwise." with the corollary that removing your hand from it makes it unknown again, even if it is YOUR gun. Why? Because that concept makes a strong habit that leads to #2, #3, and even #4. I do not expect that to become anyone's teaching mantra, and I don't want it to become Bill's Rule #1... I'm nowhere close to that level of either knowledge, skill, or arrogance. Besides, if we're to believe a certain movie with a guy named Ted, Bill's Rule #1 would be "Be excellent to each other."

For what it's worth, ATM, I've seen you and your students. I've seen a few of them earn a Rifleman patch. I'm privileged to have seen you in Orange, Red, and Green hats, specifically, and like the rest of that program, I know that your shoots were 100% GSW-free. I can personally attest to your safety in instruction and behavior. We both have seen a certain Shoot Boss in Cloverdale snap back to his E7 roots and be vaguely terrifying when someone behaved unsafely...and I have no doubt that had you been in his place and seen the same, you would have done likewise, not because the gun wasn't treated as loaded, but because it was pointed in an unsafe direction. As you indicate, that's a tangible, not an abstract.

Maybe the question that needs asked, and I've forgotten if it has been or not, is "If someone is 'not pointing a gun at anything they do not want to destroy', and 'keeping his/her finger off the trigger until the sights are on the target', and 'knows his/her target and what's behind the target'... is that person not, by definition, paying heed to "all guns are always loaded", or the more commonly phrased, "treat all guns as if they are loaded"?

Blessings,
Bill

<bold added>

Sorry you're not getting any discussion on this, Bill, and thanks for bringing it up from what I think most would consider a neutral and open-minded vantage point.

Such insights will likely continue to be avoided simply because they are not easily addressed.

If there is some advantage to teaching as a mindset or a rule that ALL GUNS ARE ALWAYS LOADED which overcomes this unintended but unavoidable side effect, I'd still love to hear it.

So far, the major plus to teaching it seems to be that it reminds people to check the loaded/unloaded status of a gun when they pick it up - nothing at all to do with actually handling a gun safely.

I also teach people how to load and unload guns, they are able to check, recheck and change its status at will. But, that's not tied to keeping it pointed in a safe direction or keeping their finger off the trigger. There is no 'until...'

What else does ALL GUNS ARE ALWAYS LOADED provide? Good, bad, necessary, unnecessary, what's the true appeal that causes such fervent adoption and loyalty from so many of those who memorized it? Is it just because it's easy to give as a response to any and all negligent acts?

Perhaps, but the easiest catch-all response is rarely the most appropriate. Often, it does nothing at all to address or correct the actual mistake or unsafe behavior. How uninstructive shall we remain in our responses?

How uninstructively shall we approach the challenge of educating people to be more successful in safely handling guns?

Where simple is effective, shall we make it complex?

Where tangible suffices, shall we make it abstract?



I know, I know. Good luck to me and my students.

 

[ATM]

...Maybe the question that needs asked, and I've forgotten if it has been or not, is "If someone is 'not pointing a gun at anything they do not want to destroy', and 'keeping his/her finger off the trigger until the sights are on the target', and 'knows his/her target and what's behind the target'... is that person not, by definition, paying heed to "all guns are always loaded", or the more commonly phrased, "treat all guns as if they are loaded"?

Blessings,
Bill

I would simply conclude that the person was handling the gun safely.

With that, and my compliments on a well crafted wall of text, I will take a break from this discussion in the hopes that others will comment.

Thank you.

 

[churchmouse]

I tried to read all of this but yeah......I need to go get a drink ans a sammy.....

 

[308jake]

I tried to read all of this but yeah......I need to go get a drink ans a sammy.....

Make it a double.

 

[churchmouse]

Make it a double.

On it.

 

[churchmouse]

With all of the opinions given I will still handle every firearm I pick up as loaded even after I check it.
For me this is just good discipline......for me anyway.
Every barrel down and away until such time I am alone or I have the slide locked back or the cylinder dropped or the bolt open.
To my weak and addled mind it is just the best.

 

[SubicWarrior1988]

I think it's important to understand both sides of every argument. I'm going to switch gears here for a moment and advocate for 3 rules



As a member of the NRA and advocate of the 2nd amendment, it's never been a more important time to be unified as a gun community.

With the political season bringing 2nd amendment issues to the forefront, more people than ever are purchasing firearms for personal protection, sport and to exercise their constitutional rights. There have been a record number of Background checks performed for the past 18 months straight. First time shooters and new gun owners are a huge portion of these background checks. It is of the utmost importance that all gun owners handle their firearms safely.

The NRA has over 125,000 certified instructors and train One Million gun owners, each year, in safe firearm handling and various aspects of shooting.

There are several approaches to gun safety, but we've found the most effective way to train all gun owners, experienced and inexperienced alike is to adhere to 3 simple rules.

The fundamental NRA rules for safe gun handling are:

• ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. This is the primary rule of gun safety. ...
• ALWAYS keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot. ...
• ALWAYS keep the gun unloaded until ready to

Our experience when training millions of new shooters is that these rules are easy to remember, easy to implement and will maintain our goal of gun safety.

The NRA has long fought for the rights of gun owners, we have 5 million members, we are the original civil rights advocates for the 2nd amendment and gun owners in America.

Please join us in our goal of training every single gun owner in America so that we may, as a unified gun community, exercise our 2nd amendment rights and protect our families.

https://home.nra.org/about-the-nra/