The only person that should be looking down the barrel of your gun is your attacker.

Otherwise, you end up like this person. (h/t Shawn). Don’t worry, it’s not gory or anything… a little frightening, and a lot of head shaking at the rules violations.

Let us learn from the mistakes of others:

• Never look down the barrel of a gun!
• ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Your face is not a safe direction.
• All guns are always loaded.
• Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy… like your face and head.
• If you fire a round and it goes click, obviously something is wrong. You may have a hang fire, which may well have been the case here. Keep the gun pointed in a safe direction (i.e. not your face), wait about 30 seconds (or more if you wish, no harm).
• What good do you think is accomplished by looking down the barrel anyways? If in fact you think there is a barrel obstruction, UNLOAD the gun first, then use something like a cleaning rod to pass through the barrel. You could even disassemble the firearm first. This goes back to the point about all guns always loaded. Break it into component pieces so all you have is a “tube of steel” isolated from all other parts and then ok, you can look down the “tube”. Even then my head is wired enough to only want to look down the tube from the breech end.
• Shotguns do not send clouds of death. Notice the hole in his hat brim wasn’t much bigger than the shotshell diameter. You can still miss with a shotgun, and lucky for this guy he did.