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Accountability
Jan. 22nd, 2017 03:04 pmI have a lot of blogs bookmarked. I check very few of them daily. Hognose's, over at weaponsman.com, is one of the few that's an essential part of my morning routine. Dude's a retired Army Special Forces NCO now living in New Hampshire, homebuilding his own airplane, collecting guns, and writing prolifically (I eagerly await his book on Czech/Czechoslovakian firearms for my own reference). For a gun blog, there is refreshingly little political commentary (though he does seem to have it in for the Veterans' Administration medical system - justifiably so, IMO).
Despite being a lifelong shooter (first learned around age six) - or perhaps because of it - I have a lot of problems with American gun culture. As a body, American gun owners have a lot of attitude and safety problems. These, in turn, drive our overall negative image among people who don't share our proclivities. Put simply, we are our own worst enemies in the political arena.
The safety aspect shapes a lot of my own practices. I've pretty much given up on going to commercial shooting ranges because of the complete lack of training and safety on the line, combined with an absence of oversight and intervention from the so-called "range safety officers." And most shooters have no idea how dangerous they are. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is strong at the range.
Anyway. The reason for this little rant is Hognose's recent post on applying aviation safety concepts to firearms training. There's an aviation saying that the rules are written in blood. Well, in gun culture, we keep making the same damn lethal mistakes without changing the rules. That's unacceptable, folks. If we do not fix our body count ourselves, fixes will be imposed from outside, and they will be both less effective and less palatable than anything we can come up with.
Hognose makes the case more eloquently than I can. It's worth five minutes of your time to read the whole thing.
Despite being a lifelong shooter (first learned around age six) - or perhaps because of it - I have a lot of problems with American gun culture. As a body, American gun owners have a lot of attitude and safety problems. These, in turn, drive our overall negative image among people who don't share our proclivities. Put simply, we are our own worst enemies in the political arena.
The safety aspect shapes a lot of my own practices. I've pretty much given up on going to commercial shooting ranges because of the complete lack of training and safety on the line, combined with an absence of oversight and intervention from the so-called "range safety officers." And most shooters have no idea how dangerous they are. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is strong at the range.
Anyway. The reason for this little rant is Hognose's recent post on applying aviation safety concepts to firearms training. There's an aviation saying that the rules are written in blood. Well, in gun culture, we keep making the same damn lethal mistakes without changing the rules. That's unacceptable, folks. If we do not fix our body count ourselves, fixes will be imposed from outside, and they will be both less effective and less palatable than anything we can come up with.
Hognose makes the case more eloquently than I can. It's worth five minutes of your time to read the whole thing.