Three Gun Safety Rules

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. Whenever we have a weapon under our control, we wanna make sure what we're doing is being safe and being very careful about what we're doing with it. We need an objective set of standards so that everybody can look around the room and know that everybody's being safe or at least know of someone not being safe and if there's a violation of the safety rules. So to get everybody on the same page we're gonna talk about our three safety rules. Safety rule number one, is to keep your trigger finger off the finger until you're ready to shoot.

So what I wanna do, is make sure we understand what finger off the trigger really means. Now, clearly, this gun is locked back, administratively it's been checked as open, the chamber is clear, there is no magazine inserted and I've check with my training partner, Mike, to make sure that we're 100% clear. Finger off the trigger means all the way up on the frame. For a right-handed shooter, we don't wanna be able to look from the left side and see the trigger finger anywhere down in this area. Okay, that's too close.

We wanna keep it all the way up. Keep it up on the frame, clearly where it's out of the way. That's until we're ready to shoot. Ready to shoot means we're on a range. It's been designated for live fire.

We have a target that's been identified and the command to fire has been issued by an instructor, or you've been given the option of finding a target in our 360 degree maze, for instance, and are gauging appropriately when you've seen it. You will be ready to shoot at that point, when you've identified a target, extended towards it, you're then gonna be ready to shoot, you're gonna move your finger to the trigger, touch and then press. You remove your finger back to the frame as you come back into the ready position to assess and look for more targets. That's the drill for safety rule number one. Safety rule number two, I've also been demonstrating and that's to keep the weapon pointed in a generally safe direction at all times.

When the weapon is pointed in a generally safe direction, it means that no one is likely to get hurt if the weapon goes off. Whether negligently, or on purpose. Generally speaking, down in front of you at the floor is going to be your generally safe direction. Of course, if there were people lying down, if you were moving down a set of stairs, that may not be it. So objectively, the rule is, weapon pointed in a generally safe direction at all times.

Again, this includes when you're going to shoot. In a training environment, this is a steel wall. We've identified it as a generally safe direction. There's a target up there we identify. We extend, the weapon is still pointed in a generally safe direction, touch, press, bring the gun back in, depress the muzzle, and this allows us to then move around and assess and look for other potential threats that we might need to engage.

Safety rule number three, is what we call the big picture rule. The picture rule's there to remind us that this is a weapon, which if used negligently, or maliciously, could hurt or kill you or someone else. This third rule we have in there as the big picture rule because sometimes people get so worried about one small detail of what they're doing, or they get excited about something and they forget one or more of the rules. For example, if you're so worried about your finger being off the trigger, that you turn the gun to look and see, now the gun may be pointed in an unsafe direction. If you're worried about your thumbs being crossed, in terms of having a good 360 degree contact grip, and while you're trying to figure that out, you've forgotten rule number and left your finger on the trigger, we could again, have a negligent discharge to cause someone to get hurt.

We use only frangible non-toxic ammunition here on our ranges, so that we can be reasonably sure that no rounds are gonna come off one of these steel targets at an angle that we haven't accounted for. That we don't have to worry about rounds coming back towards the shooter, or coming back towards some of our sensitive equipment, our computer lighting, or things like that. Of course, safety is first, and that's why the generally safe direction is going to be towards those target stops, even though if these were traditional lead rounds, these directions and angles may not be safe. It's important that you only train under close supervision in approved training areas, in the ways that the ranges you're training on were designed to be used. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.