Firearm Safety: Pointing Guns in a Safe Direction Reminder

Here comes another important tip from the Personal Defense Network. Whenever we're in a training environment, we need to think about safety. Of course, safety as a concept is simply the idea that the benefit of any endeavor in the training environment needs to significantly outweigh any known or perceived risks of that endeavor. Let's talk about the direction that we're gonna point the pistol or a rifle, any firearm, in a training environment, and how we should think about it in terms of safety, as well as practical efficiency for the actual tactics or techniques that we're training. When we walk out onto the range to practice our defensive pistol shooting for a carry gun, we know that the gun is overwhelmingly gonna be pointed straight down.

Now, yes, there are opportunities for carrying in a fanny pack where the gun might be pointed off to the side. There opportunities for carrying in a shoulder holster, maybe inside of a purse. There are some other variations, but 99% of the time, I see people come out to the range with their preferred carry method, the gun is pointed straight down. That allows the hand to get on the gun very easily, allows the gun to come up out of the holster, and then we can orient the gun in whatever direction we need to orient it in order to address a threat. So let's think about how we can do that process most efficiently.

And again, this is gonna be the endeavor that we're trying to get a benefit from. We're gonna practice getting the gun from the holster, coming up, orienting it towards the threat, driving straight out into our line of sight. And of course that's where I would shoot. Well, that's what I need to practice. So let me think about that.

During this endeavor, as the gun comes up out of the holster, points towards the target and drives out, of course, the gun's never pointed in an unsafe direction. Gun pointed straight down at the ground, that's a safe direction. Gun pointed straight back at the berm, that's also a safe direction. Now, we're at the Ben Avery Shooting Range just outside of Phoenix, Arizona. This is one of the most elaborate complexes of shooting ranges in the country, and it's one of my favorite places to come out and tape these video clips and do some training.

Great dirt berms, great people, great ranges, everything's clean, everything's as safe as it can be. But you'll notice that, even though there's a giant mountain back there that would protect the bullet from flying off into a neighborhood or maybe into some campsite out in the desert, if I were to point the gun above the actual berm here, there's no roof. If I were to take this gun and point it straight up in the air, that is not a safe direction. Now, far too often on a lot of different training ranges, I see people with their gun pointed high, whether they're pointed high in the ready position, they're pointed high while they're reloading, they're pointed high as part of a tactical or technique procedure when they're assessing an environment or getting ready to engage a threat in a training drill. But if we think about it, pointing that gun up in the air means we have absolutely no accountability for where that bullet's going to go if a round were to be launched.

Now, it's easy enough to say, well, I'm not shooting during that moment. And we're not talking about purposefully shooting rounds up in the air, we're talking about trying to avoid an accident. There is no way that the benefit of pointing the gun up in the air outweighs the potential risk in a training environment of having a round go out, not hit a berm, not hit a mountain and not hit the ground. We always wanna be accountable for the rounds that could come out of our gun. Catastrophic failure, negligence, accident, distraction, all of the things that we know can happen, we need to be accountable for when we make our plan.

Now, aside from that, forget about the administrative safety concern, let's also talk about, again, the efficiency of pointing the gun up in the air. Now, I'm gonna clear this gun. Gun is completely empty, there's nothing in the chamber, no magazine in the gun. I'm gonna leave it locked open. If I take this gun up out of the holster and point up in the air and then point it back down, I'm being inefficient.

I'm taking more time, effort and energy than I need to to get this gun up here and then coming back down. If this were a long gun on a sling, same thing. If I take the gun and point it up in the air only to bring it back down, I'm being inefficient. Of course, if I had a stock, if I could put the stock on my shoulder as soon as I grabbed the gun on the sling, now, if I were to go up in the air, I've got the stock away from my shoulder, away from my chest, and I'm gonna have to put it back on in order to get into a shooting position. So not only is it unsafe, it's also incredibly inefficient.

Think about what you're doing with your firearm. Be aware of where you're pointing the muzzle. Keep the muzzle in a training environment pointed back at the berm or down at the ground, just like it usually starts in your holster. That's a safety rule and it should be followed on every training range, wherever you are. Be sure to check out the Personal Defense Network for more important tips just like that one.