Karl Rehn’s latest article, “Tune Up Your Gun Handling” is now available at the USCCA website and also their print magazine.
It’s a great article showing various gun safety violations. I’m sure you’ve seen them, and you may have committed them yourself. It’s an opportunity to learn about them, then take a step back, swallow pride, and let’s all work to improve our gun handling.
What you do with a gun when you’re NOT shooting it is more important than what you do when you shoot.
Probably one of the single most important things you and Karl did for me was to take my gun handling to a whole new level. Between you and Todd Jarrett (who implored me personally to make sure that as a new instructor, I put extra focus on teaching safe gun handling, because he was tired of seeing unsafe gun handling all the time) I have a completely new level of awareness and (hopefully) safety.
You’re right about the pride part. There is an element there. Something like “whaddaya mean, I’m totally safe! Ain’t shot nobody yet have I?” But there’s so much more to it.
Oh I know I had screw-ups… I still feel embarrassed about some of my initial safety violations. But in a way, that’s good. The reminder keeps me in line.
The thing with that “ain’t shot no one yet” attitude is that it will lead to someone getting shot, and you can’t take it back. If such a person won’t learn and improve their habits, I just have to choose to not be around them.