Sounds like the cop who trained me. The slightest infraction was met with massive verbal abuse and a demand for many, many push-ups. We learned.
Hey, here’s the The Smoking Gun page (Og, the irony, it burns! The goggles, they do nothing!) on Lee Paige (“The DEA Agent Who Shot Self In Foot”), who is apparently now suing the federal government for disseminating the tape and making him “the target of jokes, derision, ridicule, and disparaging comments”. According to his own testimony about his reputation, he was “once regarded as one of the best undercover agents, if not the best, in the DEA.”
Wow. just…wow. You can’t make up stuff this good.
Stranger
She was/is one of his favourites (he’s a permanant TA instructor, spent his entire life in the army and fought off retirement several times. Not interested in anything but having a good time these days so loves entertaining/being entertained by the UOTC and making sectarian jokes), so where I would have had to remove the rifle from my colon, she got a lot of banter and piss-taking. Still very funny to rip it out of her, though.
Never quite get how people manage to have NDs anyway, which I’m sure I’ll continue to say until I sleepily leave my safety off and finger on the trigger…
I spent a summer as a field sports aide at Boy Scout camp. My job was to scan the line and make sure that the kids weren’t pointing their rifles at anything… inappropriate (like the archery range). All I can say is: 11-year olds + guns=scary.
I’m not a gun enthusiast. I’ve maybe fired one a half-dozen times in my life, always under the very watchful eye of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and who walked me through it step-by-step. But if I’m understanding the OP correctly, there were bullets in the magazine, but none actually in the chamber ready to be fired, correct? If I can figure this one out, then surely anyone who is a gun enthusiast (the range officer, if nobody else) should be able to.
Again, even with my extensive lack of experience, I know that every gun should always be assumed to be loaded, and that you should never point one at anything you do not intend to destroy (among the many lessons I learned from my grandpap). I probably couldn’t have quoted you the third or fourth rules, but again, even I know that that guy was seriously in the wrong. It’s just damn fortunate that it was his own foot that got shot, and not one of the students.
OMG - what a dumbass!
(But a part of me has to think - what a tough MF to shoot himself in the foot and barely wince!)
Was interesting to see the lack of response by any responsible adult, after having a gun fired in a public setting.
Last summer I had a couple of days on the ranges in Sennybridge, North Wales. The weather was amazing, we were using the 400m range which faced out to sea.
Looking downrange through the SUSAT, I suddenly see a yellow helicopter (means air sea rescue) take off from behind the range. I stop firing just as the range control shouts ceasefire and the chopper heads out to sea.
Apparently they’d been called into a rescue a couple of miles out, and had been calling the range control to cease firing, but no-one had been manning the telephone (waste of space squaddie put next to the phone had buggered off). Brave lads took off anyway, I was very impressed!
Got me thinking, though; who puts a helicopter rescue station less than half a km behind a range? Oh yeah…the British Army.
Scariest time I ever had at the range was the occasional ‘dead’ round. You pull, the pin strikes, & nothing seems to happen. 99 times out of 100, its just a dud, but you always point down range and count to 100 any way. “One-one thousand, two-one thousand…” style. It always seemed like a tremendous waste of time until that One time I got to “fifteen one thousand” and BANG! the joker-round discharged! (yes, it was pointed down range; please don’t ask the brand of ammo; I really don’t remember.)
Very few things will knock your cockiness down several pegs like your firearm discharging when your finger is Nowhere Near the trigger…
Scariest thing I ever saw at a range:
Two guys were firing a Glock 20, the 10mm version, and it continually jammed. I thought that was very unusual, because Glocks are noted for their reliability. I asked them what they thought the problem was, and they told me that they were firing reloads, which incidentally is contraindicated by the factory. OK, well, that’s their business. Well, one time they pulled the trigger and nothing happened. Rather than putting the pistol down facing downrange and walking away for a few minutes (which is what you’re supposed to do in case it cooks off), the guy racks the slide, only to find that the round is jammed and the extractor will not pull it out.
In other words, these clowns did not precisely measure the cases that they reloaded, and they reloaded a ballooned case which got stuck. That in and of itself is idiocy, but that’s not where it went really bad. No, what they did next was much worse.
The geniuses decided that rather than going to a gunsmith and getting the pistol properly fixed, they would TAKE A SCREWDRIVER AND A HAMMER AND HIT THE PRIMER THEMSELVES. So one of the morons held the pistol and the other moron got in position. It was at that point that I asked them what the hell they were doing. They told me that “they were cops, and they knew what they were doing”. :eek:
At that point I calmly unloaded my weapon, packed it up, went to my car, and told them that I would be standing by to call an ambulance for them. Fortunately, after a few attempts, common sense broke out and they gave up. Nevertheless, I think we can use this as an example of what NOT to do. :smack:
Good lord.
The mister and I occasionally go to an outdoor range that is free, but unfortunately also not staffed (it’s in a state wildlife management area). Most of the time there are at least a few people there who know what they’re doing and can help maintain proper range etiquette and procedures. One time, though, there was only one other guy there, obviously with a brand new pistol, who kept examining it, waving the damn thing all over the place. The second time he did it, I hollered, “Dude! Do you mind not pointing your gun at me?” At least he had the good sense to look embarrassed at that.
I would not be at all opposed to a law that requires a gun safety course and proof of basic competency (similar to a driver’s license test; knowing how to load/unload, clear the chamber, etc) before allowing anyone to buy one. The number of idiots out there is terrifying.
Correct. When you load a semi-auto, you have to pull the slide back and press the slide release lever on the side of the gun. When you pull the slide back it cocks the hammer, and when you hit the slide release the slide moves forward and chambers a round. Pistols that can only fire a round in the chamber when the hammer is cocked are called single-action. Most modern semi-autos are double action, which means just pulling the trigger will work the hammer and fire a round in the chamber. The recoil of the slide then cocks the hammer again. But even these guns have to have a round chambered in the first place.
Most semi-autos also have a device that holds the slide open after the magazine is emptied, so you just put in another mag, hit the slide release, and you’re good to go. This guy had apparently knew so little about guns he figured you just put the mag in and pull the trigger. Because his gun was double action and he never chambered a round, the hammer kept falling on an empty chamber.
You can avoid a lot of these problems by sticking to revolvers. They are less sophisticated weapons, but with their lack of sophistication comes more reliability and ease of use, plus a less steep learning curve. I’d liken it to the difference between learning to drive a stick shift (shooting a semi-auto) and learning to drive an automatic transmission (shooting a revolver).
Some people have mentioned the range employee should’ve had a clue. the employee wasn’t watching the shooter the whole time. Basically this guy kept coming back from the firing line saying his gun just wasn’t going off. The employee did the pencil test just to make sure the firing pin was hitting the chamber, and he made VERY sure the gun was unloaded. I think the employee, like myself, never figured the gun’s owner was so clueless that he didn’t even know how to get the weapon into a firing condition.
If Airman is making reference to the same spot where he and I have gone in the past, it’s just like yours-outdoor, unsupervised. One must beware of idjits-in PA all you have to be is of age and have a clean record to purchase a firearm. The box might be smarter, but oh, well.
That’s the place, the open Game Lands pistol range about 10 minutes north of here.
Did I tell you that it was closed for about 6 months? Wanna know why? Because a bunch of jokers came in and blew the posts holding the target boards to the ground with shotguns. Did I mention that the posts were 12-inch tree trunks? They blew the hell out of those things. There was nothing left to even prop a target against, let alone pin one. They only recently fixed it back up, but God knows how long that will last.
Yeah, there are some serious idiots here, without question.
I took an NRA handgun safety course a few years back, and the instructor told us a story about a Texas National Guard unit that had all of its members banned from using a particular firing range again after they managed to destroy most of the target equipment in a “Mad Minute” before they were about to leave.
And then he told us a story of HIS stupidity where he forgot to unload and clear his weapon before he was cleaning it, and he happened to pull the trigger. Gun goes off, bullet ricochets off of a couple of things before putting a hole in… a firearms safety manual. It wasn’t even HIS manual, he was borrowing it from a friend to compare it to the older edition he had.
He had to return a firearms safety manual to his friend with a BULLET HOLE in it. 
He stressed that the story was funny because nobody got hurt, although his wife had him sleeping on the couch for a week after having a gun go off in the house at 11PM.
EDIT: Oh, and hey, does anyone remember the story about the guy who wanted to check a rifle into his baggage at an airport soon after 9-11? The person at the counter told him he couldn’t do that, he insisted it was unloaded and safe, and demonstrated this by shooting out a nearby window before being tackled Heisman-style by a couple of irate National Guardsmen.
I grew up around guns, and my fathers instructional style is much the same as **Stranger ** and **Silenus’ ** seemed to have been. You messed up (say by pointing a gun at someone, or not clearing your gun and leaving it blatently unloaded before hoofing it downrange to check targets, etc), you sat in the car while everyone else got to shoot all day after a complete ripping of a new poop chute. No second chances.
That being said, rangemasters must be the most patient and calm people on earth. I would have a massive coronary if I had to preside over some of the behavior I’ve seen at ranges, especially from “trained professionals”.
Rick sent me photos that appear on this page. Click on ‘continue reading’ below the photo. :smack:
Now see, these stories are why I support things like manditory safety courses and the like-it’s not that I’m afraid of guns-I’m afraid of STUPID PEOPLE with guns!
Who was it that once had a thread about their gun safety course where all of the people were pretty much behaving like this? Was it Crafter Man?
Yea. Here it is.
FYI, I think every new shooter should enroll in a firearms safety course. But it should not be mandatory.
We have a shooting range in our backyard. Lots of people use it. I am usually the RSO during these sessions. Over the years I have witnessed a lot of safety infractions, but thankfully none have been serious. The only incident that resulted in bodily injury happened to me… my FAL (in .308) blew up in my face. :eek:
Oh, my! That must have been interesting. I believe that is what we refer to as a catastrophic failure. 