Tim explains it well over at Gun Nuts.
Tim and I were in a class together recently where we ran into a similar issue. Another instructor teaching on the bay next to ours thought it was perfectly safe to have his carbine students climb up a hill behind us and shoot… from a position in clear line of sight to everyone on our bay.
In other words, if any of them had moved his muzzle about two inches to the right — even accidentally — their rounds would have been flying through the same three dimensional space being occupied by our heads. The worst part is that their instructor was dumbfounded by our concern and it took more than a polite request to get him to call a halt to their plan. Here’s a guy who is claiming to teach high speed cool guy combat carbinery and he doesn’t understand that maybe some of his novice students could, you know, make a mistake. As one of the guys from our class noted, quite a few of the carbine students themselves looked pretty uncomfortable with what they were being asked to do.
Is muzzle safety really so complicated?
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
I had the unfortunate experience once on a range where some newbies showed up really excited by their new AK and no inkling of muzzle discipline. After repeatedly asking them to not point a loaded rifle at me and my friend, I finally turned and pointed a fully loaded M1A at them and asked them to put the rifle down or leave. They chose to leave.
Its a long ugly story, but I was once at a class where the instructors did nothing to regulate a guy who had severe muzzle control issues and was trowing shots directly past guys from my team who were also at the training.
I had to advise this guy that our team had made a pact that when, not if, he clipped one of us the other guys would all shoot him for doing so as we could only assume he had lost his mind and gone off the deep end. He got the message and cleaned up his act, but the entire situation was far from satisfactory.
Being older and presumably wiser now I woulda packed up, demanded a refund, and made the 16 hour drive back home instead.
Some turd sweeping you with the muzzle is: at the least not caring that they are threatening your life and at the most demonstrating homicidal intent. I cannot read the turds mind.
I was in a class with a well known trainer who first privately, then publicly admonished a student not to muzzle him and others. The behavior continued until he stopped a drill, and notified the student in front of the whole group, that if he muzzled him one more time, he was going to assume the intent was to shoot him, and he would proceed accordingly. Everything got very quiet. I was relieved.
If an instructor has let someone muzzle students enough times that he’s run out of warnings and has escalated to lethal threats, I think somewhere along the line he skipped past “kicked out of class.”
Yeah, but were their fingers straight? 🙂
Todd-
I was there for that. What concerned me almost as much as this death defying act of carbine zeroing was the fact fewer than I can count on one hand from our class seemed uncomfortable with the aforementioned act. I appreciate you stepping up to the plate and negotiating with (aka talking some goddamn sense into) the high speed carbine instructor. The most haunting (and telling) words from that individual’s mouth were “what would you have me do?” as though the appropriate action wasn’t the most obvious. On a personal note, I’m sorry I didn’t get to thank you on Sunday for all that I’ve learned from your blog/forum. I’ve been lurking around this place for the longest time and it was nice to finally put a face with a name. you can always trade that g35 in for a f150, ya know. haha
signed,
the only person in NJ that owns guns
IWB — Thanks, dude! Really sorry I missed the class on Sunday. Great meeting you and hope to see you on the range again some time. Stay safe!