Call me an elitist, but I sincerely believe that people without formal training shouldn’t be teaching others how to use firearms. Sadly, pistol-training.com‘s friend Xavier (of the incredibly popular Xavier Thoughts blog) relays yet another tragic story showing what happens when well-intentioned but inadequately trained people try to demonstrate proper gun handling.
“Benally then demonstrated by putting his own .9 mm Rueger [sic], which he believed to be unloaded, to his head and firing it …”
You can read more at XavierThoughts.
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
While I won’t know “for sure” until I attend the August class in NM, for clarification are you stating that pointing a pistol at your head and pulling trigger is *not* a preferred method of clearing a pistol?
1990 when i was 18 i had a friend who was 17 that shot himself in the head in the driveway, i talked to him right before he did it. after that i had nothing to do with guns from 1990 until 2007 and it took a lot of coaxing from my father for me to get one for ccw after a stranger asked if i had any money one night. i have a very healthy respect for what a gun can do and i think once you lose all fear of a gun you are more dangerous than those who have a fear.
Sad. Will Marshall use this to validate the round?!
I wonder if this has something to do with something that is usually not a divided attention task (verifying/unloading a pistol) and turning it into one when you are trying to demonstrate or talk about a particular task. In a way, teaching it distracts you from doing it properly. Consider the famous DEA agent who just happened not to be professional enough also in an instructional setting.
Lots of us probably go throughout life frequently loading, unloading, chamber checking, holstering, etc, but if we’re thrust into a situation where it changes slightly, but we still think that we can do it unconsciously that may where it opens the doors for errors.
Should we create a new rule to chamber check 5 times before you point a pistol at your own head and pull the trigger?
Training or no, anyone who puts a gun to their head to show others it’s unloaded, pays the price of stupidity. Can’t train stupid out of people as in “I’m the only one qualified to..” Bang…and no on….
Marko — You hit the nail on the head. Clearing a weapon cannot be done at a subconscious level. If you’re not paying attention, if you’re not actually looking and verifying, then you haven’t really cleared the weapon.
A lot of gun-related activities are cool when you do them fast. Cleaning a weapon isn’t one of them. The sign of a professional isn’t the guy who clears his weapon fastest, it’s the one who does it properly every time.
YOU DONT HAVE TO BE A SO CALLED EXPERT,TO KNOW YOU SHOULDNT PUT A GUN TO YOUR HEAD AND PULL THE TRIGGER.DONT NEED A PROFESSIONAL FOR THIS.IF YOU DONT KNOW,TO NOT DO THIS,THEN SIMPLY PUT YOUR ARE TO STUPID TO BE AROUND A FIREARM
Stupidity isn’t against the law, but it is sometimes punishable by death.
It is not as much training as thinking when you do unsafe acts. Even skilled trainers sometimes have failures to think. The range I use has tables at each firing point. The rear of the tables is the firing line. I observed a skilled trainer with a group of first-time shooters standing at the side of the table, loading pistols for the shooters. The result was he was in front of the firing line and pointing weapons he had loaded down the line. When I got the the range and observed this, I called the range cold, got the trainer aside and explained what he was doing. He got the big eyes, thanked me and then explained to the class his unsafe acts.
Pointing an unloaded weapon at my head? Must be training, because I’d never think to do that.
I think that by following the four basic rules on gun handling – which he should have been or have already taught his students, the same being the most basic – such a fatal accident would not have happened.
Moreover, experience in gun handling and usage should actually increase our respect for (our) guns demonstrated by employing a more “safe” manner of handling the same and not such that would reflect over-confidence or contempt for it.