Electronic Hearing Protection for Shooting Range Safety

I wanna about electronic hearing protection in terms of safety while you're on the range, particularly while working with training partners or in a formal instructional class. Now, everybody knows that we need to wear hearing protection in regard to our hearing safety to protect our ears when we're actually shooting a live gun. Whether you're inside or outside, hearing protection is mandatory for safety in terms of hearing damage. But let's talk about what happens when I wanna talk to other people. When I wanna interact with other people, when I'm getting instructions from someone who's trying to teach me, especially when it's a new skillset or something that I might be uncomfortable with or that's very foreign to me in terms of the way I've shot or trained before, being able to hear instructions clearly is incredibly important.

And this is where electronic hearing protection comes in. Now, this particular set is designed specifically for me. These are designed to go inside of the ear. They actually slip right into the ear canal, they fill the outer portion of the ear and they really do a great job of blocking all of the incoming sound. But what they have, of course, is a microphone and speaker set up that allows normal volume things like verbal instructions, conversation, maybe a command or a buzzer or a whistle to be heard very, very clearly.

And then only over a certain decibel level do they actually shut down the speaker and allow you to just rely on the protection so that you don't damage your hearing. Now, when we think about hearing protection, we always think about that idea of wanting to make sure that we can hear as little as possible. We wanna block out as much sound as possible. But it can actually put you in a dangerous situation or endanger others on the range if you aren't hearing the commands clearly. Now as an instructor, this is something I deal with quite often.

The good news is you don't need to have a custom set of inside-the-ear hearing protection to get the benefits of electronic hearing protection for safety. There are many different types of hearing protection on the market for under $100 that work well. They're not gonna be fancy, customized inside the ear. They're probably gonna be earmuffs and they may not be the lowest profile earmuffs, but they're gonna make your training infinitely safer. It's gonna make it easier for you to learn, it's gonna make it easier for the instructor to communicate the important information to you, and it's gonna make everybody on the line more comfortable knowing that you can hear the commands, the instructor can communicate what he needs to to you, and that everyone is gonna be doing exactly the same thing.

Most of the time, when there's a safety issue on the range, it's because of a misunderstanding. And it's one thing to completely misunderstand what you're supposed to do when you've heard everything clearly, but if you can't hear what the instructors or your training partners are actually saying, you really put yourself in a potentially dangerous situation. So I'm a big advocate of electronic hearing protection, and now that there are affordable models at every price level, there's really no reason why you shouldn't look into having a set if there's any way that you need to hear what other people are saying while you're on the range. And of course, for most of us, that's gonna be just about every time we go there if it's nothing more than a range safety officer or the people that we came to shoot with. Electronic hearing protection, an important part of range safety during your training.