I went to the local indoor range yesterday but the range wasn’t quite open since they were finishing some welding. So I sat outside on a bench (beautiful morning), pulled out my iPhone and checked my email.
An email from the National Shooting Sports Foundation came in and it was telling about the release of their new YouTube video on indoor range safety. Nicely timed. 🙂
One little nit. He suggests using both ear plugs and ear muffs for children. I would drop the “for children” qualifier. The noises are just as loud and do just as much damage to an adult as it would a child, tho likely a child has more hearing to lose and is going to be more sensitive to loud noises. I always recommend folks use both muffs and plugs at indoor ranges because it makes a big difference. Be sure when you use plugs that you insert them properly (you don’t just squish them into your ear). Furthermore with children, their ear canals may not be deep enough to accept adult ear plugs, so you may need to trim the back-end of the plug a bit so that plus muffs won’t leave the child uncomfortable; yes it may reduce the capabilities, but better than the child complaining or worse, removing their muffs to relieve the pain. I also noticed the man in the video had ear muffs that were very small and thus likely have a low NRR. You should strive to have the highest NRR possible. You don’t need fancy electronic muffs; they don’t cancel noise, they just amplify sound so you can better hear people talking, but then they’ll cut off the amplifier when they hear a sudden loud sound… so any noise reduction is just from the passive muffs themselves. You can buy high-NRR-rating passive muffs for about $20. Small price to pay to help preserve your hearing. Plus, the more you reduce that noise, the less likely you are to flinch. Want to develop a good flinch? shoot at an indoor range with minimal hearing protection.
Apart from that, I thought this was an excellent video on not just gun safety and range safety, but specifically indoor range safety.
Stuff From Hsoi 
Just came back from the range and read this. Have to say I love my amplifying Peltors. I traded some design work for shooting gear a few years back and Michael from Talon Arms picked most of what he gave me, and put the hearing protection in there. I thought it was a little expensive for little benefit. But when we got to FrontSight I couldn’t have imagined not having them. Hearing range commands with out having to pull them off – which you see people do all the time – was worth the price. Heck, you could hear better because they were amplified.
Interestingly my boss told me the other day he read an article by Massad Ayoob that said he kept a pair next to his bed side gun. Something to think about. You get the amplification to actually hear better, an advantage over the bad guy. And once a gun is fired the other guy is deaf. If you use a long gun inside of a house, you are talking permanent hearing damage.
Course you could just get suppressed weapons. 🙂
I love my Pro Ears. Now that I’ve used amplified hearing protection I won’t go back because yes, you can hear everything you need to hear. I mean, if it’s just you shooting alone it doesn’t matter much if you use active or passive. But classes and competitions and such tend to go better when you have them because you can hear people talk. Even with ear plugs in as well, it works nicely.
That said tho, any hearing protection still comes from the passive muffs themselves so, the bigger, thicker, more NRR they can have, the better for your hearing.
Interesting thing from Mas there. Being able to hear a little better, to hear someone tip-toeing around, yeah, that’s a good thing to consider.
Or yes, suppressed weapons. Or better… both. *grin*