Discussion UsefulNotes / GunSafety

Question: do we want to begin a list of works in which characters demonstrate unusual care with gun safety? I could add an example right now, off the top of my head:

• In the first Tremors movie, pay attention to how Burt and Heather handle their firearms. For example, when Melvin hands Burt back his revolver after they fled the trailer to get to the rocks, Burt immediately checks to confirm that the cylinder is empty even though he had emptied it himself less than a minute prior.

The note about reporting a lost and found gun sort of irks me. Is there story or some such that says police will charge you with a crime for merely reporting a lost and found gun? And how come lawyers and clergy are exempt from this?

I recall in an episode of Dirty Jobs when Mike was doing gutter cleanup in LA, the collectors mentioned they even found firearms in the gutters and reported it to the cops without ill effect.

A while ago, I created a YKTTW page called "Stray Shots Strike Nothing" — is there some place on this page that it would be appropriate to link to it?

I've been thinking about Renisha McBride with regard to:

• Identify your target. You don't want to shoot something you thought was a threat, but instead was someone innocent. The number of people every year accidentally killed when paranoid homeowners have shot at suspected prowlers [emphasis added], or when hunters have mistaken people for animals, is depressingly high.

The main reason I have not added any kind of link to the bolded section is that the story is still new enough in the public mind that the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment might apply.

So, sixth bullet point. At this point, MAI 742 and I have gone back and forth three times on this, and I want to put an end to this before moderators have to get involved:

1. Guns are the most succesful and popular means of suicide (see bottom of page).
2. If you are in a physical or mental state where using a firearm would make you a risk to yourself or others, do not do so (see bottom of page).
3. Gun-suicide kills more people than gun-murder (see bottom of page).
4. If your mental or physical state would make you a danger to yourself or others, do not use firearms. (See especially bottom of page.)
5. If your mental or physical state means you'd use a gun to kill yourself and/or others, please get help. (See especially bottom of page.)

In my opinion, a good bullet point for the Short Version list at the top of the page has to be universal advice, and "don't shoot yourself" (or even "don't shoot anyone, especially yourself") doesn't read that way. It would be like a book offering driver's license test advice saying, "Don't drive at full speed head-on into a tree" — it doesn't work on a literary level. The reason why I was writing my versions the way I did was because that wording is universal (covers "don't shoot drunk, drugged, exhausted, &c.") and covers the "don't shoot yourself" admonition.

MAI742 raised an interesting point over PM with me about the section on gun suicides: if many readers of the page are likely to stop before going through the entire article, do we want to move that section up close to the top, where they are more likely to see it? Stylistically, I feel it is a better fit where it is, but I would like to solicit other opinions.

Pulled the following:

• Unless you happen to be a sport shooter doing skeet or marksmanship, in which case your firearm should be only used on the range/competition area, ideally checked out there and checked back in when you leave, or if you must keep it personally, locked up in a gun safe to which you - or, if you are a teenager or not 100 percent mentally well at all times or ever choose to become intoxicated, a designated healthy and safe adult such as your parent, a manager, a responsible coach or teammate, or a lawyer - have the only key. If you are solely interested in firearms for non-wounding and non-killing purposes such as sport shooting/target only shooting, you should also consider a less lethal option such as airsoft or BB guns if they are allowed in competition, or at the very least, for any off-range practice, or consider archery instead of shooting.

...because I didn't think it fit under the bullet where it was added (and because it's a bit wordy). There are some interesting points we might want to add back in somewhere on the page, though:

• The airsoft and BB gun options for target-shooting.
• The option of either renting a gun at the range or (am I reading this right?) storing your gun there.

Galactapuss At The Shooting Range

In about 1985 my jr. high school ag class went on a field trip to an indoor gun range. The teacher was a trained gun user and, as an experienced horse rider, served on the occasional posse with the sheriff's department. The teacher gave us the standard safety speech (always point downrange, always treat gun as if it's loaded, etc.).

The teacher finished his speech and selected a girl from our class as the guinea pig for what we were going to do at our individual firing stations. The target system was a standard rope/pulley/motor/switch setup. The teacher and the rest of the class were lined up along the wall behind the girl's station. After the first shot she did a sort of 'hands out' / 'did I do that right?' gesture, while holding the gun, turning around toward the class, tracking the barrel across us as she turned. We all ducked, doing a sort of inverted wave (the stadium audience thing) as she turned. After correcting the girl's action, the teacher walked her through the steps of loading a new target, moving the target downrange, loading the gun, etc.. On her first shot she hit the rope and the target system fell to the ground.

Galactapuss And The Banning (CA) Police Department

In about 2004 I lived in a sort of triplex apartment building in Banning, CA. There was one large apartment in the front and 2 smaller apartments, one to each side, in the back. From the view of someone on the street, I was in the small apartment on the left. There was a small single-family home, unoccupied, in the lot to the right of our building. The second lot to the right had no building at all. The third lot to the right had one single-family building in front (near the street) and one single-family building in the back. I've long since moved, but here it is: http://maps.google.com/?ll=33.926492,-116.886942&spn=0.000676,0.000871&t=h&z=21 . I was in the leftmost apartment in the building to the left of those two trees.

One evening I walked outside and met a Banning PD officer walking through the driveway in the left of the above map. The officer had his shot gun out and at the ready (though pointed at the ground). I asked the officer what was going on. He said they had received reports of a loose pit bull harassing the neighborhood children. I told him about the unoccupied house to the right of our building. It had an uncovered panel in the back, leading under the house. He asked me to show him the panel. We walked around the front of my building, then back to roughly under the two trees, the one furthest from the street. As we walked back there we were able to see behind the building (one lot to the right), across the vacant lot, and to the rear apartment 3 lots over. That apartment had a swamp cooler right about where the blue dot is in the picture, to the right of the 2 white cars. There were no cars or trucks there at the time. There was a pit bull laying under the swamp cooler. The pit bull's owner was standing on the porch, trying to get the pit bull to come inside. The officer, looking in that direction, raised his flashlight and pointed it over at the swamp cooler and pit bull. The pit bull immediately got up and ran toward us. In a single action the officer dropped his flashlight and raised and aimed his shotgun at the oncoming pit bull. The officer waited a second or two until the pit bull was right about where the blue tarp next to the black pickup is in the map, then fired 3 shots in rapid succession. On the first shot the pit bull did not alter course at all. On the second shot the pit bull's path began to veer a little bit to our left (its right), and on the third shot the pit bull veered further to our left, and tumbled to the ground, dead. A couple of minutes later 5 or 6 additional officers arrived. Everyone present was interview- the officer, the pit bull's owner, and me. It was apparently an ideal situation from the officer's standpoint because an impartial witness had seen the whole thing. I had gone outside to walk around to more or less the same spot, so I would likely have met the pit bull myself if the officer had not been there. As far as I'm concerned, the officer saved me from at least a mauling and possibly saved my life. Thank you, Banning Police Department.

The gun safety part was the officer having the discipline to wait the second or so it took for the pit bull to travel closer, meaning downrange included the ground and not the pit bull's owner.

I don't make donut jokes any more...

I love this summary. It's everything my Dad has ever taught me about gun safety.

There's no harm in redundancy. I mod at the Darwin Awards, and we get many many submissions of so-called 'experts' who screwed up. We call most gunshot submissions 'Too Common' because there are just so many idiots out there who don't follow these rules. Particularly the 'always treat the gun like it's loaded', 'don't leave the things just lying around, and 'watch where you point that thing!'

Maybe this is just my OCD, but I can't handle the "always treat it like it's loaded" rule. If a gun is loaded, I'll unload it. If I continue to think of it as loaded, I'll repeatedly attempt to unload it until, like a SIMS character, I starve to death.

I did some pruning.

Yes, while we'd like to emphasize safety and repeat ourselves, maybe we should emphasize the fact that we are not licensed/certified/etc. gun trainers and it's better to go out and get some actual training than read TV Tropes.

... Actually we should probably do that anyway on the first line.

I think xenol's idea of putting a disclaimer at the top of the page is a good idea, but reading it I realized that it is somewhat redundant with the one at the bottom. For reference, the two disclaimers:

What I propose is pulling the bottom and changing the top to the following (hat-tip to The Other Wiki):

I think the new Short Version and the 4 rules at the bottom are a bit redundant — should we delete one or the other?

I dropped a note asking anyone with additions to try to see if there's a way to lump the point in and to use the discussion if possible.

"That bullet will succumb to gravity sooner or later, and when it falls back to Earth it will be moving at at least its terminal velocity..."

Terminal velocity is the speed at which acceleration due to gravity is cancelled out by deceleration due to air friction; nothing can go faster than terminal velocity.

I vote to delete "at least" from the above quote in the interest of scientific accuracy.

Both in fiction and in real life, I've heard of someone cleaning their gun and accidentally shooting someone. Does this ever actually happen? I mean, I assume that if one is going to clean his/her gun, step one would be unload it.

BTW, if someone is wondering why I mention that it happened in real life, and then asked if it ever happens in real life, the explanation is this: I heard of someone who was shot, suspiciously, by someone who was allegedly cleaning his gun. What I'd like to know is, is this a valid excuse or is it an obvious lie?

"Do nothing with a gun that you would not do without a gun."

That's from section two. I... I just don't understand it. What principle is it meant to be explaining?

Are these rules from an official list? Because otherwise I'd add a rule I personally invented "When your drunk friend starts deliberately violating the rules you know he knows, it's time to go home."