Safety Considerations Specific to an Indoor Range

There are a number of other safety considerations that have to be taken to account when we're gonna start our defensive firearms training in practice at the indoor range. Number of things that sometimes we don't think of right away. For example, if we're used to always shooting at an outdoor range, we may find that earplugs are a sufficient way to protect our hearing against the muzzle blast of the guns because the sound dissipates over a greater distance. If we're not used to being in an indoor shooting range we may not be prepared with just the earplugs for the way that the concrete box tends to hold the sound right inside with us. A lot of folks who shoot outdoors are gonna choose when they move indoors to supplement that hearing protection, perhaps earplugs and the headsets over top them to help protect that hearing a little better. Another thing that we often don't think about is the walls are really close to us right here, the ceiling position right here, and while we might be at our outdoor range shooting the brass is ejected from the semiautomatic pistol or rifle that we're shooting and just kind of flies off and lands on the ground next to us. Here it can easily bounce against one of the walls and come back right to us. For this reason, many shooters, when moving to the indoor range, are going to choose to wear a cap with a bill to protect their face from that impact of that brass falling on them. Also the wraparound style of eye protection to protect, to provide more protection to the corners of the eyes against something like a piece of brass or a piece of debris in flight as imposed because of the closeness of the walls. Another consideration, another challenge that we face when we're doing dynamic defensive training, especially from inside the box here from inside this booth on our indoor range comes from the targets themselves, particularly when we closed the targets in, when we make the distance between us and our target a combat realistic distance where it's gonna be fairly close. Most indoor ranges have been designed that the targets are gonna be closer to the backstop so that we have that distance in which to practice our, fine tune our aiming skills, our sight alignment and things like that. When we're doing our dynamic defensive training we want those targets to come in closer, but as the targets come in closer we have some challenges imposed upon us by the relative proximity of things that aren't there on the outdoor range. A couple of examples. If we're shooting at this target from this distance right here I can utilize the large combat accurate area, the head, I can utilize the numbers, but if you notice the boxes below, the A box and the B box, from this distance right here an angle that would allow me to accurately shoot into the B box would also be causing me to shoot into the floor. Into the dirt berm at the outdoor range, it's not a big consideration, but here at the range it's probably something that's gonna cause an issue with the folks who operate the range, to say nothing of the potential safety aspect of it. Another example would be look at the target in the farther distance there. If I were using any of those left-hand side numbers the angle from which I am shooting that target, if I were in the other lane, the angle from which I'm approaching that target is obviously gonna cause a strike on the walls, something that although it does happen on indoor ranges, it's inevitable that the walls and the floors are gonna get shot. We certainly don't want to set ourselves up into a position where that's going to happen intentionally. Another example would be, if we look at the targets, you'll notice up here at Blackwing they simply just draw a black line on the cardboard near the top of the cardboard. And we don't allow you to put the target any higher than that. One of those reasons for that is the way that the bullets might reach above that. If we get above that line, that upward arc, the angle at which the bullet's going, we're gonna take it into a higher point on the trap. We might be hitting the ceiling or we might even be cutting the cables or the lines that suspend the targets in the first place. And obviously that's not gonna be something that we're gonna want to have happen with our target. Another consideration that we have to make allowances for here on the indoor range has a lot more to do with our immediate safety. If we look here, we see that we have a conveniently provided shooting bench for us to put our gear on or perhaps even shoot off of the bench when we're utilizing the indoor range for our target shooting purposes. When doing our dynamic defensive training, this bench can impose a number of limitations. The one thing that we wanna talk about right now is the fact that a lot of people are using a low ready, a high to the chest or muzzle oriented low Sul type position, ready position with the muzzle oriented forward away from the feet. On an outdoor range this is a good situation to be in because the feet are clear and the gun's pointed in a safe direction. If we take that same position and put ourselves here inside the shooting, both, we see, we find that the muzzle is pointed directly down at this object, and we've got some steel surfaces here. We've got some flat pieces in here. We've got a thick wood top right in here. If the gun were to discharge, we've got a lot of material here that might deflect a bullet back toward our leg, back toward our foot, and could be a much more immediate safety concern. So when we're using a facility like this that has the benches and the wall set up like this we have to be very conscious that this position now has to become this muzzle forward position. The gun's gotta be oriented up and away from that bench at all times. So when we look at it, although a lot of the things that we're gonna do when we come to the indoor range may be similar to the experience we had at the outdoor range where we didn't have some of this equipment here. When we break it down, we see that there are several things that we're gonna have to do differently. Several things that we're gonna have to be conscious of in order to keep ourselves safe and to keep us from damaging our equipment, damaging the range equipment. Obviously we don't wanna do that. And we wanna be able to, again, maximize that value we're gonna get out of our training experience.