A couple of years ago I did a post simply called "Guns" (see: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/07/guns.html). In that post I covered ground that had been well trod by others, something I try to avoid in these posts, but I just couldn't stop myself. I had become so disgusted by the arguments put forward by the gun lobby that I just couldn't restrain myself. Their arguments are easy to eviscerate because, frankly, they are baloney.
For this post I am going to talk about the actual thing, the gun. So let me review my credentials. I owned cap guns and squirt guns as a little kid. I have fired but not owned BB guns and pellet guns, also as a kid. But I have never owned or even fired what we now think of as a gun, a device that uses an explosive to expell a small piece of metal at high speed.
Nevertheless, I know something about guns. I have read vast amounts of fiction of the detective, thriller, or action kind. Guns feature heavily in this type of literature and you can learn a lot of you pay attention. Also, we swim in a vast ocean of guns and gun culture. Guns frequently feature prominently in the news. Again, if you pay attention you can learn a lot. Then there are also lots of opportunities to see and hear what actual experts have to say. And I avail myself of that. But in terms of actual formal education and training on the subject, there I can make no claims whatsoever.
But I am going to proceed anyhow. And, unfortunately, you will learn a lot more accurate and reliable information about guns here than you will by listening to the bloviating on TV of many so called experts. That's because many of these "experts" are more interested in pushing an agenda than giving you clear, concise, and dependable information. So here goes.
Guns come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. They can be small enough to conceal in the palm of your hand or so big that they don't fit in a standard railroad car. These larger guns are often called artillery or "field pieces". I am going to ignore them (and all kinds of other specialty types of guns) and stick with guns that are designed for single individuals to hold in their hands and use.
They come in two general types. The smaller ones are generally referred to as handguns and can be operated by an adult using one hand. The larger ones are often referred to erroneously as "rifles" but are more accurately called "long guns" because they feature a barrel (a long tube with a hole down the center) that is more than about 16" (the actual number varies slightly depending on who is making the distinction) long.
Long guns feature one of three types of barrels. A "shotgun" has a barrel with thin walls and is typically used to fire a group of pellets out of the hole in the center of the barrel rather than a single "bullet". A "musket" has a thicker, stronger barrel and fires a single bullet. When people say "musket" they are generally referring to the "smooth bore" type of musket. A "rifle" is a musket that has a set of carefully designed groves on the inside that spin the bullet as it travels down the barrel. (The lack of "rifling" is what gives the smooth bore its name.) The spin causes the bullet to follow a straighter path resulting in better "accuracy".
The next most important thing that distinguishes between types of long guns is the "action". The action is the mechanism for handling ammunition. Revolutionary War era muskets featured a "flint lock" action. Earlier designs were called "wheel lock" actions. (For our purposes, these are indistinguishable.) The "trigger" (a small lever operated by a single finger) caused a mechanism to make a "flint" (a type of rock that sparks when hit) strike a "steel" (literally a small piece of steel).
If all went well a spark got thrown into the "pan", a small depression filled with gunpowder, lighting the gunpowder on fire. The fire in the pan then burned along a small channel into the rear of the barrel. This would ignite a larger quantity of gunpowder that would "explode". This explosion would propel the bullet out of the end of the barrel of the gun at high speed.
Can something go wrong with this process? Yes! So guns of this period were cranky and required a great deal of skill and care to operate successfully. And we haven't even talked about the whole business of getting the bullet to hit what we want it to. And these guns were heavy. It typically took a strong man to hold them steady and fire them. And if you tilted them the wrong way the powder would spill out of the pan and it wouldn't fire. It was also a complicated and time consuming process to load one and prepare it for firing. But if everything went well they were quite deadly. And that was the point.
The design of muskets had evolved considerably from when they were first introduced hundreds of years before the Revolutionary War to the Revolutionary era. That evolution continued and continues up to the present day. And one target of this evolution was the action. Something quicker and more reliable was needed. In several stages the "cartridge" was developed.
The bullet is one component of the cartridge. But also includes is a housing, usually called the "shell". Inside the shell is the explosive and some other stuff. On the back of the shell is a special spot called the "primer" that can be set on fire just by hitting it smartly. The shell holds everything including the bullet together and keeps all the pieces properly aligned. This means you just have to put the cartridge into the gun and you are ready to go. The process of getting the gun to go off is also much simplified. You how cause a "firing pin" to strike the primer smartly and everything goes boom. Note that "bullet" and "shell" are often wrongly used as if they are synonyms for cartridge.
From here the evolution of the action focused on the specifics of how the cartridge got loaded into place to be ready to be fired. An early design was called a "bolt" action. An easily manipulated lever called the bolt sticks out to the side of the gun. Moving the bolt appropriately ("operating" it) causes an area at the back of the barrel (the "chamber") to open up.
An "ejector" mechanism causes any spent cartridge/shell present to be "ejected" (thrown to the side) from the gun. The operator then places a fresh cartridge into the chamber and moves the bolt appropriately. This causes everything to close up, the cartridge to be moved into place, and the firing pin to be "cocked" so that a small pressure on the trigger will now cause it to strike the primer smartly.
All this was a big improvement. But more improvement was possible. A "magazine" containing several cartridges was added to the action. As the bolt was operated it would feed a new cartridge from the magazine into the chamber as soon as the old one had been ejected. That sped things up considerably. Early magazines held on the order of a half dozen cartridges. But this meant the operator only had to occasionally mess with reloading.
But things could be improved even more. The action could be and was improved so that it used part of the power of the main explosion to, in effect, operate the bolt. This meant that the gun required no operator action to be ready to fire again almost immediately. This kind of action is called a "semi-automatic" action. It means that the gun will fire once each time the trigger is pulled as long as there are cartridges left in the magazine. But wait! There's more.
Why require a trigger pull each time you want the gun to fire. A slightly more complicated action would permit the gun to keep firing rapidly as long as the trigger is held down and there remains "ammunition" (cartridges) in the magazine. This kind of action is called a "fully-automatic" action and the gun is now called a "machine gun".
The first gun that was capable of firing continuously was the "Gatling Gun". It saw use in the later stages of the Civil War. It was big enough and heavy enough that it had to be mounted on its own little cart. The original design had between six and ten barrels and was operated by means of a fairly large crank instead of a trigger. A couple of years later a British fellow named Maxim invented a single barrel design that used a fully-automatic action similar to the one described above. There are advantages and disadvantages to both the Gatling and The Maxim design. And we see this trade off playing out right down to the present.
And now let me move on to short guns designed for one-handed use, often called "pistols" or "handguns" (the terms are synonymous). The same kind of evolution characterized their history. All the very earliest guns were long guns. But it didn't take long for people to figure out how to jam all the mechanisms of a flint-lock musket into a design that could be used one handed. So flint-lock pistols existed at the time of the Revolutionary War. But they were not very practical. The same "tilt" problem affected them and it was much easier to tilt them because they were smaller. So, other than "dueling pistols", pistols literally designed in pairs to be used in a duel, they were rare.
But once the cartridge was introduced pistols became a much more practical alternative. And the original pistols were single-shot weapons roughly similar in design and use to a bolt-action musket. And, due to their small size, a "double barrel" design was eminently practical and was quickly developed. These guns featured two triggers, one for each barrel.
A very popular double barreled "derringer" (the term actually refers to any small gun) was introduced by Remington in 1866 and by others soon thereafter. The double barrel derringer design remained in general use all the way to the 1930's. Many western movies and TV shows feature double barrel derringers being waved around (and occasionally used) so they are a good place to check out what I am talking about.
But two shots were not enough so the "revolver" design was developed. Colt came out with an early example in 1836. A portion of the barrel was replaced with a larger revolving cylinder that had holes drilled in it to hold five or six (in the most popular designs) cartridges. After each shot a mechanism would automatically rotate the cylinder to align the next cartridge with the barrel and firing pin. Early revolvers actually predated the general use of the cartridge. But revolver designs almost identical to modern ones were in general use by the end of the Civil War.
The process of reloading a revolver was fairly elaborate and no way to simplify things and speed the process up was ever developed. Nevertheless, the revolver was the most common pistol design in use until the 1980's when an entirely different design largely took over.
In 1911 Colt sold a radical new design for a pistol to the U. S. Army for use as a "sidearm" (a pistol in a holster attached to a man's belt at the side) by its officers. (All the other services ended up eventually adopting it.) This design used a semi-automatic (but often incorrectly shortened to "automatic" or even "auto") action. The magazine, (often referred to as a "clip") was housed in the grip of the gun.
A simple lever released the magazine to drop out of the bottom of the gun where it could easily be filled ("loaded") with cartridges. If an additional magazine that had been pre-loaded was available then the gun could be put back into action within a couple of seconds. Each standard magazine held seven cartridges but a fully loaded magazine would fit into a gun that already had a cartridge in the chamber so it was possible to fire as many as eight shots before needing to reload.
The "Luger" pistol uses one of several other semi-automatic action designs that have been developed for use in pistols. But the patents on the Colt 1911 design eventually expired and most "automatic" pistols now use a minor variant of the Colt 1911 design for their action. And the evolution of the pistol eventually followed that of the long gun and fully automatic actions were developed. Some designs date back to World War I. But designs that achieved substantial popularity did not arrive until the US MAC 10 in the 1970s and the Israeli Uzi of the '80s. Other successful designs have since entered the market.
But, as I mentioned above, there are trade-offs. The most basic and most long standing is short barrel versus long barrel. The longer barrel permits more accuracy. But a long gun is, well, long. It can't be carried around in a holster as a sidearm. Foot soldiers most value the long-range accuracy so they carry a long gun. Officers value convenience more so they go with a pistol.
The other long standing trade off is power. In the US the "caliber" of the gun is the number most commonly used to providing a rough estimation of its power. In much the way, engine displacement is used to provide a rough estimation of how powerful a particular car is. Both are misleading but represent a popular starting point. (You will have to look elsewhere for more on this with respect to cars. I provide lots of specifics with respect to guns below.) Popular guns vary in caliber from "22" (actually .22) to "45" (actually .45). What is being measured is the diameter of the bullet. The diameter of a "22" is twenty-two hundredths of an inch. The diameter of a "45" is forty-five hundredths of an inch.
The rest of the world also uses bullet diameter to provide a rough estimate of the power of a gun. But instead of using a measure based on English units (inches or fractions thereof) they use metric. Specifically, they use millimeters abbreviated as "mm". But it's just a different way of saying the same thing. "9mm" is pretty much the same as "38 caliber". 7.62mm is the same as "30 caliber". And the caliber of bullets in an M-16/AR-15/M-4 is .223. This turns out to be "5.56mm" and references to 5.56mm ammunition are common.
The old "NATO standard" M-14 military rifle used "NATO standard 7.62mm" ammunition. The original AK-47 was specifically designed to be able to use NATO standard 7.62mm ammunition. (In a clever move it could also use a slightly larger "Soviet standard" cartridge that did not work in an M-14.) You can now get an AK-47 that is "chambered for" (uses) other common sizes of ammunition if you want. But there are lots of AK-47s chambered for 7.62mm ammunition around so 7.62mm ammunition is still manufactured in large quantities.
It would seem like a "45" should be about twice as big as a "22" and, therefore, perhaps twice as powerful. But a bullet is a three dimensional object and all the dimensions scale in proportion. So a "45" is actually about 8 (2x2x2) times as powerful as a "22". Other common sizes like "25", "32", and "38", (along with other less common sizes) also all scale accordingly. So the size and weight of a specific type of bullet is important. But the amount and type of explosive in the cartridge is also important.
"22"s come in "short" and "long". In both cases the diameter of the bullet is the same but the "22 long" cartridge contains more explosive so it is more powerful. In general, we have standard loads and "magnum" loads of explosive. A "magnum" cartridge generally contains a bullet of the same diameter as the same size standard cartridge but the "shell" is bigger so it can contain more explosive. How much more? There is a standard for the amount of explosive in a "357" cartridge and a different standard amount of explosive in a "357 magnum" cartridge. The same thing goes for a "44" and a "44 magnum" or for other standard/magnum pairs. But I don't know if the amount of explosive in each type of cartridge of the same caliber follows a standard ratio or not.
Another long standing difference is between "smooth bore" and rifled barrels. Rifled barrels are much harder and, therefore, much more expensive to produce. And rifling a shotgun barrel makes no sense so it is never done. But there is something very roughly equivalent with shotguns called "choke". This has to do with how broadly the pellets are dispersed.
If the pellets are tightly grouped then more of them will hit the target but your aim must also be more accurate for any of them to hit the target at all. So if "winging it" is good enough the choke can be set for a broad disbursal pattern. If only a multi-pellet hit will do the job then the choke should be set for a tight disbursal pattern.
A key attribute of a gun is its "stopping power", its ability to kill and maim effectively. Generally speaking a bigger bullet going faster has more stopping poser. So a "45" has a lot more stopping power than a "22". At one end a "22 short" is unlikely to kill you. It's possible but the stars would have to align just right. It can maim you but it isn't particularly that good that either. It has little stopping power. That's what all those other bigger bullets are for. And, as you might expect, a Colt 1911 "45" has a lot of stopping power. A big factor in this is the fact that it uses a big, heavy bullet. But there is more to the story.
Its "muzzle velocity", the speed the bullet leaves the "muzzle" (opposite end of the barrel from the chamber), is relatively low. And this affects what the bullet does when it hits you. It tends to break and tear a lot of things. If any one of those things is critical, you die. Even if nothing critical is hit you are still likely to be grievously wounded and, therefore "out of the fight". To a first approximation, the human body is a bag of water and a "45" bullet happens to throw up a big bow wave. And this bow wave spreads damage far and wide.
The problem with a Colt 1911 "45" is that it is a big, heavy, not very accurate gun. My father carried one as a Naval Officer during World War II. It is almost impossible to hit anything at any kind of distance, he told me. And everything I have learned since bears this out.
And, among other problems, it has a vicious "kick". The barrel is a long way from the gun's center of gravity. When you fire it this "eccentricity" causes the barrel to kick (jerk) up a lot. And that's if you are strong and have a good grip on the gun. If you aren't or don't, the gun can fly completely out of your hands. This makes it hard for the gun to stay "aimed" (pointed in such a way that the bullet will hit what you want it to) as the bullet travels down the barrel.
After you have fired the gun you must get the gun's kick under control, reposition it to the general direction you need it pointing in, and re-aim it, all before you are ready to fire again. And, of course, all this being jerked around is hard on your hand. Hand fatigue can make it hard to fire the gun rapidly and repeatedly.
A "22" doesn't have much kick so it doesn't suffer from this problem. But remember that it also doesn't have much stopping power. There is a happy medium. The "38" and "9mm" both have lots of stopping power but also much less kick than a "45". As a result law enforcement used "38" revolvers almost exclusively for many decades. The "9mm" is a smaller, lighter gun than the "38" that has the same stopping power. This combination is why it has become so popular in the last few decades. And that brings me to another point.
An explosion is, in actuality, just something burning very rapidly. It is common in old time movies to see someone carefully pour out a line of gunpowder (also often referred to as "black powder") on the floor. The line leads up to a keg of powder. He will then light the other end of the line and run away. The line burns slowly (and telegenically) until it reaches then keg. Then you get a "boom".
The fact that we can observe the line of black powder burning tells us that at that point it is burning too slowly to qualify as an explosion. But once confined by the keg, the very same black powder does explode. (The reasons black powder explodes in the keg but not in the line are too complicated to get into so I am just going to skip over them.)
For the purposes of this discussion my point is that when it can be gotten to explode, black powder is a "low" explosive. The rate at which the burning propagates might be faster in the keg than in the line on the floor but it's still not all that fast compared to other explosives.
AMFO is another low explosive. The name comes from the fact that its primarily components are Ammonia fertilizer (the "AM") and fuel oil (the "FO"). Commercially prepared AMFO is commonly used in open pit mining. Timothy McVeigh used a "mix it yourself" recipe he found on the Internet to make the AMFO he used in the Oklahoma City bombing.
C-4 (also known as "plastique") is an example of a "high" explosive. The burning propagates much faster in a high explosive. There are technical reasons to prefer a low explosive over a high explosive for use in a cartridge but both can be made to work.
The "low explosive" attribute of black powder is an advantage when it comes to using it in a cartridge. But other attributes of black powder confer distinct disadvantages when it is used this way. When it explodes it creates a lot of smoke. If lots of guns are going off lots of times then after a while no one can see anything. This led to a change to "smokeless" powder roughly at the time of the Civil War.
And that's not the only problem with black powder. Relative to modern alternatives, it takes a lot of it to make a given amount of explosion. So pistols tended to be quite big and heavy before the Civil War. They needed to be to allow for enough black powder. Better explosives led to smaller and lighter pistols after the Civil War.
But the improvements did not stop there. The specifications for a standard "38" cartridge were set a relatively long time ago. It was more compact than the old black powder cartridges because better powders were available but a "38" cartridge still had to accommodate a fairly large amount of explosive. As the chemistry of explosives continued to evolve still better options became available.
When the specifications for "9mm" cartridges were set these "still better" powders could be and were specified. So the "9mm" cartridge could be and was much smaller than the "38" cartridge and still delivered the same amount of power. And a smaller and lighter cartridge meant the 9mm gun could be made smaller and lighter than its "38" sibling. And that's why "9mm" guns are so popular now.
Now remember a "38" and a "9mm" are pretty similar in terms of stopping power. But the ammunition for each is not interchangeable. The sensible thing would be for Americans to just go with the millimeter thing that everybody else uses. Instead a pretty idiotic and barely workable alternative was adopted.
There is now such a thing as a "380". The bullets are the same .38 caliber but the cartridge uses the more modern "9mm" explosive. So a "38" and a "380" use quite different cartridges. American gun buyers are told in effect "it's a 38" in terms of stopping power but are told at the same time that they must use the more compact but equally effective "380" cartridge instead of a standard "38" cartridge. Like I said, idiotic.
There is one more aspect of all this that needs to be explored. That is the design and construction of the bullet. Originally, bullets were spheres. This was the easiest shape to make. Then over time they became more "bullet-shaped". They had a little bit of a nose on the front and a round cylindrical shape in the back. This was more aerodynamic so bullet-shaped bullets flew straighter.
Later some bullets were given a sharp point. Muzzle velocities had by this time gotten a lot faster and some bullets were now going faster than the speed of sound. The sharp point was found to help with the "bow shock" of the "sonic boom" a bullet flying at supersonic speed created.
Another innovation was "jacketing". Early bullets were made of pure lead. When they hit something they often shattered or splattered. This tended to give them a lot of stopping power when it came to shooting people. But it also meant that even modest efforts at bullet-proofing were effective. A core made of something heavy like lead allowed bullets to remain heavy. A steel jacket, on the other hand, meant a bullet could also punch though at least a modest amount of bullet-proofing on its way to its intended target.
But a steel jacketed bullet tends to make a nice neat hole through a body. This is ideal for hunting as the objective is supposed to be to put meat on the table. A nice "through and through" wound means only a small amount of the meat is rendered unsuitable for dining on. And, in fact, hunters are heavily regulated in terms of the guns and ammunition they are allowed to use. They must use a single shot (bolt action or similar) long gun of middling caliber (roughly .30 caliber) firing a steel jacketed bullet and having a magazine that holds only a few (roughly 5) rounds.
But a hunting rifle is not a very good gun to use for a military weapon. The neat hole it makes substantially reduces its stopping power. It is a step in the wrong direction when compared to a big spherical unjacketed hunk of pure lead from an older weapon. So the military spent a lot of money looking for a third way. And they found it. A steel jacketed round can do a tremendous amount of damage if it tumbles once it has hit its target. And it is easy to make a long slim bullet tumble. So the M-16 (introduced during the Vietnam War in the '60s) pulls together a lot of threads.
It uses a small .223 caliber bullet. That sounds bad because it is so small. But the cartridge is a super-magnum design that produces an extremely high muzzle velocity. The barrel is rifled so the gun is extremely accurate. And the bullet is much longer than it is around. So it flies straight while it is in the air but starts tumbling immediately when it hits something. The high speed is a substitute for the weight. And the tumbling is a substitute for the shattering/splattering behavior of a pure lead bullet. The result is a whole lot of stopping power jammed into a small, light package. This combination is the columniation of hundreds of years of well financed research into the best way to kill people.
And the M-16 can be set to "single shot", "fully automatic", or "three round burst". So the rate of fire can be adjusted to whatever is most appropriate for the circumstances that are encountered. The military has since tweaked the M-16 design in various modest ways since to produce the M-4. It is essentially the same gun and uses exactly the same ammunition. And Colt, the original manufacturer of the M-16, produced a civilian version of the M-16 called the AR-15. It is exactly the same gun except that it lacks the "selector" lever. It is always in "single shot" mode. Unless, of course, you buy an aftermarket "mod" kit that adds the selector back and turns an AR-15 back into an M-16.
And various manufacturers now make knock-offs of the AR-15. Regardless of make and model they are all called, for good reason, "assault weapons". But the tip-off for figuring out if a particular make and model of gun is an AR-15 knock off is the ammunition. Anything that uses .223 caliber (or 5.56mm) ammunition is an AR-15 or a knock off and, therefore, an assault weapon. (Guns that are civilian knockoffs of AK-47s are also lumped into the assault weapon category. As are actual M-16s, M-4s, AK-47s and any other kind of machine gun.)
A gun can be but rarely is used solely for target practice. And there are guns that are designed and built specifically for competitive target shooting competitions. It turns out they are bad at killing and maiming and that's why almost no one buys one. As a result we never see them outside of when there are showing target shooting events in the Olympics. And we see damn little of them even then.
Other than that, the only thing a gun is good for is killing and maiming. The market for hunting rifles (see above for their specifications) represents a small and diminishing part of the gun market. Most guns sold today are military weapons or their close cousins. That means these guns are designed to solely kill and maim people and are not much good for anything else.
How good are they? Guns work better than the blasters (or phasers, or whatever they are called at the moment) in science fiction movies and TV shows. They work better than light sabers. We see blasters and light sabers and the like in these movies and on TV not because the work better than a plain old military-style gun (they don't) but because they look cooler. That's how good today's guns are at doing what they have been designed to do.
I grew up in the old "six-shooter" or "six-gun" days, so called because everybody packed a five shot or six shot revolver. All the cowboys and cops in entertainments carried revolvers of one model or another. And frankly, in almost all situations, if five or six shots doesn't get the job done then it's not going to get done. (Sometimes through the magic of editing everybody would blast away seemingly forever without reloading in some kind of melee but often nobody the results were pretty ineffective.)
The exception, of course, is mass slaughter. If you want to kill a whole lot of school kids or people attending a music concert, or the like, then a gun that is able to fire many rounds at a high rate is the right tool for the job. Soldiers are now trained to avoid "full auto" and use either the "single shot" or "three round burst" modes.
"Full auto" just doesn't work in most military situations. And remember that a soldier's job, when he is in combat, often boils down to killing and maiming as many of the enemy as he can as quickly as he can. But at the same time it is also important to not injure innocent bystanders and modern warfare often puts soldiers in close proximity to innocent bystanders. In a mass slaughter situation, however, killing innocent bystanders is the whole point so "full auto" works just fine.
There is just no situation in which an assault weapon is the appropriate tool for civilian use. It is a poor hunting weapon. It is also almost always illegal to hunt with an assault weapon. It is a poor "home security" weapon. It's too big and clumsy. A handgun just works better. It is a poor "self defense" weapon. You can't holster it while you can holster a handgun. It is a decent weapon to use for target practice. But better guns for this purpose are available and they are cheaper. It is, in short, irresponsible for regular people to own these weapons.
And this brings me to the phrase "responsible gun owner". We are supposed to take it as gospel that 99+% of gun owners are responsible gun owners. But the evidence is overwhelming that this is wrong. There are lots of irresponsible gun owners out there.
You are an irresponsible gun owner if you own an assault weapon.
You are an irresponsible gun owner if you own large capacity magazines. They are only good for shooting lots of civilians quickly.
You are an irresponsible gun owner if you one a "bump stock" (a device that turns a semi-automatic rifle into an full-automatic rifle).
You are an irresponsible gun owner if you "open carry" a long gun in a populated area.
You are an irresponsible gun owner if you own a gun that doesn't have a "safety" on it. You are also an irresponsible gun owner if you don't religiously set safeties ON for all guns they are not in use.
You are an irresponsible gun owner if you don't always keep all your guns secure. That means stored under lock and key when not in use. It means when you have a pistol on your person and it is not in use then it is in a holster that has a security strap and the strap is engaged.
There are a few tiny exceptions. If you are a collector and you keep your collection unloaded and under lock and key then it's okay for you to own assault weapons or guns that don't have safeties.
Thousands of people are killed by guns every year. A lot of them are suicides. And a lot of people commit suicide with a gun they don't own. If a potential suicide does not have easy access to a gun then the chances of that person committing suicide is greatly reduced. And if you have suicidal tendencies get rid of your guns immediately.
A lot of other people are killed by gun accidents. In many cases a small child (under 6) gets hold of an unsecured gun and kills himself or another small child. Lots of other people (teenagers, adults who should know better, "responsible" gun owners) get to fooling around with a gun and it goes off "by accident" and someone is killed or severely wounded.
Responsible gun owners should know this and act accordingly.
Finally, here is some good safety advice from various experts I have seen -
*** Always assume a gun is loaded even if you "know" it is not.
*** Never point a gun at a person unless you really intend to shoot them.
*** Keep your finger well away from the trigger (outside the trigger guard and extended along the side of the gun works well) unless you are about to shoot your gun.
*** Always make sure a gun is accessible only to those who should have access to it. That means lock guns up when there are children, strangers, people with mental problems, and especially if there are people who are drunk, angry, or both, around. If it is physically possible for any of these kinds of people to be around then behave at all times as if they actually are around.
And, of course, the best way to make sure this advice is followed is to have no guns around and stay away from people who do (or even might) have guns around.
No comments:
Post a Comment