The town I used to live in has to have signs in the laundromat to remind people to check their pockets for ammo.
Apparently they've had to replace a couple dryers.
You know how old I was when I learned the most important rule of firearms? Five.
I learned it from watching an anime called Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs.
The rule is "the weapon is always loaded, treat it as such".
When a fucking anime from the 80s has better firearms safety than a boatload of CERTAIN people, something is horrifyingly wrong.
Idiots?
Its easier to paint all gun owners as reckless at best, criminals at worst, when you have dumbasses like this walking around. Truth is, the vast majority of american gun owners I've met have been strict followers of the 4 rules. If I ever meet someone who isn't, they immediately become strangers after I leave the situation. Ill try to correct behavior, but not everyone is receptive. Thats where common sense gun laws would be great to have, like proving competency with a firearm and the safety rules especially, every year if you want a ccw. Unfortunately, the ccw in my state is an online course with 10 questions at the end, and fees and a waiting list to get your physical card. I could (and did, but did not carry until confident with my setup) get this ccw without ever having fired the gun I intend to carry, much less handled it safely.
Also, for people less familiar, if you are ever handed a firearm, IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO CLEAR IT YOURSELF. Just because someone clears it in front of you, does not make it clear. I dont care if the person field strips it in front of me, the first thing im doing after they hand it to me is clearing it myself.
Gun owners reading maybe? Please be more reponsible/safe with your firearms. Be as safe as you think you should, then be a little safer. There's countless little things to work on, like not breaching the fire line or responsible clearing before leave line. We all take a huge responsibility when we decide to carry concealed. You have to delete your ego, you can't be short fused. There's no room for prejudice, or stupidity. You alone are responsible for what comes out of your weapon, and if the responsibility is shrugged off, tragic things happen that you have to live with. Don't mess around, stay sharp.
Treat EVERY GUN as if its loaded (imagine that rounds can magically appear if you set it down or take eyes off, because they sometimes do!) Keep your finger off the trigger until ready and safe to fire. (Keep your booger hook off the bang switch!) Do not point your firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy (whether youre firing or not, whether its loaded or not) Fully know your target and all things behind it(bullets have a tendency to keep going)
I dont care if the person field strips it in front of me, the first thing im doing after they hand it to me is clearing it myself.
This kind of attitude is the exact right way to do it when safety is involved. You make it automatic, not a decision. It's like wearing your seatbelt. It saves you time and energy while producing the best results.
Put another way: Crazy shit happens every day. You make it automatic not because you distrust the person unloading it in front of you. You do it because you shouldn't trust yourself to be perfectly flawless in life and death situations. You do it 100% of the times that you rationally know for certain that it's empty, so that you skip the check 0.00000% of the time that some crazy sequence of events quietly creates a dangerous situation.
I'm honestly very anti-firearms, I live in the USA and while I have met young veterans who take good care of their firearms and exhibit excellent discipline, I have met enough dangerous folk waltzing around toting firearms to flex power at best or to carry out violence at worst, (many different walks of life), that I do not want fire arms in the hands of anyone. The state already has a monopoly on violence, thigh high sock wearing lesbians on lemmy, or people who served and choose to own and carry aren't really necessary. We'd be better off without them as a whole. And violence isn't the absolute solution some of my peers would make it out to be.
Having observed the state, I do not trust it with a monopoly on violence. Yes, we might be better off without weapons. When we can guarantee that nazism will never, ever rise again, then we may feel free to disarm ourselves. Until then, that seems unwise. After all, ICE is doing most of their work in cities and states with harsh gun restrictions, where it's safe for them to oppress.
obligatory firearm safety reminder:
only by holding each other accountable can we make sure that everyone stays safe and has fun.
Thanks. I've never owned, fired, or even held a gun.
I have no intention to. I knew most of these, but I'm glad to see it officially written out like this.
If I'm ever in the position where I need to handle a gun, I can do so more safely then I would have before.
Good work. Keep that shit up.
1: Don't have a gun.
The only rule You really need.
I get your point, but hunting, as a sport, is about as old of a sport as you can get, and for that sport there will always be people who prefer firearms.
At a basic level, firearms really can't be barred from most countries as a blanket rule for everyone that is never allowed to be broken.
Therefore, firearms exist and people have them. That might not be you, or your neighbor, nor anyone you know, but they exist and people have them.
If you are ever in the rare position of being in the presence of one, and/or the situation where you need to handle one for any reason, would this information not be better to know ahead of time, rather than unknown until that moment?
It's like first aid, IMO. I've known first aid for well over two decades, including CPR and everything. I've never needed anything more than how to correctly apply a bandaid. I'm still grateful to know what I know in case I'm ever in a situation that I may need it. That situation might never come, it may never happen. I'd rather know, and never have the need to know, than have the need to know, and not know.
Safety, first aid, anything that keeps people alive, should be universal knowledge. Doesn't matter if it's guns, cars, CPR, bandaids, or forklift safety... It's better to know it, and never need it, than need it, and not know it. Period.
Running is a sport. Swimming is a sport. Football is a sport. Hunting is a game at best. For mentally unwell people.
Oh come on. I get what you are trying to point out, but that is like saying you don't need to know forklift safety rules, as you will never operate a forklift.
Dude. Forklifts are useful.
Guns are also useful. Especially with the world at its wits end with Nazis
Calling a firearm "fun" is already part of the problem
Have you ever tried it?
There's nothing quite so uniquely irritating as someone intensely critical of something they know very little about.
Not wanting to to call the private ownership of deadly weapons fun is hardly "intense". Of anything it undersells the point.
Speaking as someone who enjoyed regular target rifle practice and competitions for the best part of a decade since you insist that matters.
I'm not American, and this kind of absolute is completely unacceptable.
You're basically fun-shaming.
There's plenty of stuff that's universally disliked, like... Idk, murder.... But that's not the whole reason guns exist. Sport shooting, hunting, event target practice, can be lots of fun to people, and they all involve guns, and no person is harmed, if done correctly.
Stop being so hateful.
I don't even like guns. I've never held, nor fired one. And I wouldn't ever, even slightly, say that there is no "fun" to be had with firearms.
You're a dick.
You missed the point. Saying that calling it "fun" is problematic doesn't imply that you can't have fun, of course you can (I have, a tonne). I assume the above comment called it problematic because they weighed the "fun" of gun owners against 40k dead Americans a year and decided maybe we shouldn't be focusing on the entertainment.
You can absolutely have more gun control and not really inhibit firearm sports or hunting BTW. The USA ought to have a monopoly on Olympic shooting medals if that weren't the case 😅
Firearms are fun. Knives are fun. Martial arts are fun. At least to a decently large number of people. That doesn't mean that their roles in society don't suck.
One might say that the danger (to people, to society...) outweighs the benefits of allowing target shooting as a sport. Maybe, I'd still disagree, but that's an opinion we can argue about. We don't allow people to build their own nuclear reactors for fun, for example. But saying something isn't "fun" is ignoring that a lot of people perceive the world differently.
A lot of stupid things are "fun" to a huge number of people. Loud cars, street fights, guns... Normal people grow out of it. Just because some adult children still think it's "fun" doesn't mean we have to tolerate and allow it.
Finally somebody i can share my hobby of ordering dust particles by smell with
Disagree. I’m not from the US, so maybe guns being seen as fun is more of a cultural issue in not aware of, but plenty of weapons are seen as fun here in the UK. And while we do have gun crime, I think firearms are seen differently here vs the US.
People will go axe throwing for fun. With Scouts, we shot air rifles on camp a number of times (supervised by people who knew what they were doing). Knife throwing is also a thing. Clay Pigeon shooting is also not uncommon here.
I genuinely believe using a weapon on a (non-living) target is fun for a lot of normal, well adjusted people.
My grandpa who takes me shooting was going over the firearm safety rules and with rule two I was like “that seems extreme” and his response it’s supposed to be, a gun killing or injuring or damaging isn’t as vivid as the word destroy
And yeah for me the other rules kinda seemed a given, bullets move fast and possibly through our hanging rubber targets, the gun probably can’t fire if you don’t give it a squeeze, and as for loaded better safe than sorry.
These rules seemed almost obvious to me, and yet there’s all these guys at the range behaving like absolute idiots
FFS I can watch you clear a firearm and the first thing I will do is clear it when handed to me or I pick it up at the range.
Always assume it's loaded. It's not hard.
I don't get America, a place where you can walk around with a weapon that has no purpose other than to cause harm
Some context here: this is almost certainly a gun store, and this is going to be from the check-in station for when people come to jlhave their guns worked on, a holster fitted, or for gun sales.
I used to work an a major outdoors store and we'd have dozens of customer-owned guns come in a day, and we'd find a round in the chamber a few times a year, and we have them hell over it every time. We also had jar of shame like this one.
The worst that I experienced was when I was mounting a scope on a 300 Win Mag. The rifle was checked in up front, made it through 2 salesmen who helped them select a scope, and then to me for the mounting.
I had the customer shoulder the gun so I could find their eye position, got the appropriate mounts, and took the gun to the back and spent some time.mounting everything.
When everything was mounted properly, the optic zeroed with the bore scope (good enough to hit paper at 100 yards), and the gun ready to go I worked the action to check clearance on the bolt and a nickel-plated round was ejected. The guy at the gun check-in had seen the color of the jacket and assumed it was the magazine follower (they're supposed to che k more thoroughly, and the next 3 of us in line did the same quick visual check and were fooled by the silver color.
My asshole was puckered for a week, and when I reported the incident to the firearm department manager he threw a shifting at everyone involved (including the customer), but let me off easy since I reported the incident and he could see how shaken I was.
But it also was a great demonstration of the importance of the rules of gun safety. Even though we all "knew" the gun was unloaded, there wasn't any real danger since we all still treated it like it was loaded at all times.
Safety requires multiple layers. With the 4 rules (treat all guns as if they are loaded, do not point the gun at anything you aren't willing to kill or destroy, be aware of your target and what's behind your target, and keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire), you can screw up on any 3 of the rules without anyone being injured.
repeal the 2nd
With all due respect, right the fuck now we shan't.
We shall, maybe, some time in a faraway future when things in society are, shall we say, less immediately threatening to literal life and liberty.
gets off intoxicated soapbox
So we shan't, maybe later it's a shall, but we shan't.
Shan't.
Every gun you see is always loaded.
This is clearly a lie, but is a useful lie that if you live by will make yourself as well as others safer around guns.
General rules:
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
