Saturday, October 20, 2007

PSA on Gun Safety

When you go to the shooting range, make sure you have adequate ear and eye protection. If you wear small-ish glasses, consider supplementing them with larger safety glasses. The important thing is to make sure no powder or casings can hit and burn your eyes. As for ear protection, earplugs are good, muffs are good...both together are better. As a friend of mine discovered a week or so ago on his first trip to the range, sometimes muffs can get separated from the side of your head for an instant, leaving your delicate ear vulnerable to folks shooting very loud weapons nearby in an indoor range. He may have permanently lost some hearing in that ear. To some extent it's my fault for not checking to make sure his "ears" were on properly, but I'd never had a problem with mine (because I normally wear earplugs as well, I guess) and so it didn't even occur to me.

As a general principle, if you can add a lot of safety for very little inconvenience or expense, do it. Skimping on things like that can really come back to bite you. Hopefully this is just a temporary thing for my friend and he'll be good as new before too long.

1 comment:

ignorant redneck said...

I would like to second that!

I didn't used to use ear protection--could you speak up some? and turn on the TV subtitles!