Stop Pointing Guns at your Friends
Hi! Stop pointing guns at yourself and your friends.
I have been thinking about this for a couple weeks, because I see SO MANY people on IG flagging themselves as they dry fire. So let me reiterate the basic firearms safety rules below:
1. Don’t point your gun at ANYTHING you’re not willing to destroy (If you like your fingers then those count)
2. Treat all guns as if they’re loaded.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire.
4. Be sure of your target and what lies beyond it.
Cool? We all got it? K. Now which rules can change during dry fire? ONLY #2. If you’re dry firing then you’re obviously not treating it as if it’s loaded...because you’re pulling the trigger in your house. Of course you still check, double check, and triple check the chamber is empty/mag is empty before beginning dry fire.
Which leads me to the rules that I use for dry fire:
1. Do NOT point you’re gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
2. Keep you’re gun pointed in the direction of least consequence.
3. No ammunition or loaded magazines in the vicinity.
4. Be sure of your target and what lies beyond it.
People make mistakes. People who shoot for a living make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. That is why we follow ALL the rules, because each of them gives you a LAYER of safety. That is why we also: rock our hips forward as we holster appendix, point the muzzle away from our bodies as we holster, and keep our finger high and on the slide. All of those things provide a layer to stop you from making the ultimate mistake of a negligent discharge, and even still, if you’re following the #1 rule of not pointing you’re gun at a person and it's in the direction of least consequence, nobody should get hurt. What I’m seeing is people completely forgetting this rule during dry fire because they KNOW it’s unloaded. That doesn’t matter. If you practice something that is unsafe then you only make yourself more susceptible to breaking that rule when you *think your gun is unloaded. We have the layers of safety for our moments of human error.