Stability For Our Time

The four rules are:

1. The gun is always loaded


2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy


3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target


4. Be sure of your target - and what is beyond it

Tam posted about loaded chamber indicators on guns and why she thinks they are a bad idea.

Its very existence betrays a bad mindset to have around guns, which is the idea that "This one's loaded, so I'll treat it with extra special caution!" The problem is thinking that way implies the unwritten corollary that "I don't think this one's loaded, so I can handle it sloppily," which almost unfailingly comes back to bite the unwary in the arse and leave bullet holes in things better left unpunctured.

I had just finished adding a stock to my Mossberg 500, and I'd gone out to the back porch to try it out. I fired three or four shells, and then the phone rang, interrupting me. After the phone call, it was time to make dinner, so I used the manufacturer's process for unloading the shotgun. This is my first pump shotgun, so I was unfamiliar with the unloading procedure. I had walked through it when I first got the gun, but I followed the instructions anyway. I removed the shell from the chamber, then released all the remaining shells from the tube, and put the gun aside to make dinner.

After dinner, I went back to get the shotgun for cleaning. When I racked the slide to open the chamber, a nice fat live shotgun shell came flipping out of the "unloaded" shotgun.

Fortunately, I had already gone to the bathroom before dinner, so I avoided any embarrassing laundry problems, but my heart rate immediately went well into the triple digits. The safety was on, and my finger never went near the trigger, so there was no real danger of an ND, but at the same time, I was carrying a loaded gun that I thought was unloaded. It's like finding out the snake you were just handling was a coral snake instead of a king snake.

I made sure that the shotgun was completely unloaded, and then sat down until the shakes went away. After I calmed down, I went through the unloading process and found my mistake and corrected it. I practiced unloading and loading several timed before I cleaned the gun, just to make sure I had it down cold. Then I cleaned the shotgun, loaded it with my defensive loads, and stowed it in a safe, accessible place.

The point is this: Tam is right. If you handle a gun differently when it's loaded than you do when it is empty, you are asking for trouble because when you make a, mistake, you will become another in a long line of statistics. Because I followed all four rules, all I have is an embarrassing story. If I skipped a couple, it could have been much worse.

Hence the habit of maintaining the action in an open condition whenever a firearm is not actually in use, and is unsecured (no, I don't store them in the safe with the actions open, either, but the last thing before storage - or a period of non-use of any type, and of any length - is checking the action to make sure it's unloaded, and that's the first thing when extracting them from storage or any period of non-use). Had you opened the action for the purpose of safer handling (note "safer" and not "safe") at what you thought was the conclusion of the unloading process you would have been greeted by the chambered round right then.

Congratulations.

I was at an outdoor range once, shooting a revolver. As I pulled the hammer back for a carefully aimed single-action shot, I felt a burning sensation in my arm. I thought I had been hit by a richochet. The pain was intense. I hurriedly put my revolver down on the table in front of me to investigate, and found a humongous wasp stuck to my arm, stinging me.

After recovering from that, and finally seeing the wasp nest high among the rafters over my shooting table, I eventually noticed my loaded, cocked revolver lying on the table where I had essentially dropped it from the pain in my arm - pointing across the firing line, essentially aimed at all the other shooters. Very bad form.

Because I did not have my finger in the trigger until I was ready to shoot, I did not jerk it when stung.

Just another example of "Four-rules safe!"

I always work the action a few times after I'm sure it's unloaded.

I've still tried to clean a loaded gun. That scared the crap out of me too.

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