Guns don't kill people, middle-class gamers do.

[hirez]

Yesterday was mostly spent pottering about Chepstow with some unusual suspects and it all turned out utterly splendid. I wonder if the one-way-system pub crawl is a thing, and if not it should be.

Anyway.

Part of the gig was minding an assemblage of artfully constructed steampunkery in the castle. For reasons which I suspect the estimable autopope of this parish could fulminate over for quite some time, several of the items were handguns of varying baroqueness.

While I was standing there, everyone who picked up one or other of the pistols peered down the barrel and worked the trigger.

I have a phrase for that sort of behaviour and it is fucking idiocy.

I think it is a problem created by a particular sort of smug, (English) (middle-class) type who consider all firearms icky and therefore won't have anything to do with any aspect of them. Indeed, after the n-th time I found myself cringing and looking for something to hide behind, I was moved to explain to some small Tarquin (or Bastian or whatever pre-teens are called these days) that perhaps it would be a good idea to keep the thing pointed at the floor and finger away from the trigger until he was sure the weapon had been made safe.

This resulted in the usual set of filthy looks. The useless tossers.

I am not, in the main, the sort of person who agrees with many of the aims of the NRA (US version), but their advice to parents is spot on.

In a similar area we find the gormless sods in the office who do the same peering-and-triggering with the nerf pistols lying about. I don't actually care that the fucking things are toys don't do that it's fucking stupid and by the way don't point the fucking thing at me because you will have a sense of humour failure when I wallop you with something.

Jesus.

It's just me, isn't it? I was the one who was taught gun-safety by my parents and so I have to put up with a legion of horrible horrible bastards who'll bang on for hours about the relative merits of MP5 over G36 over Glock something-or-other and actually they haven't a fucking clue what they're talking about because they're the same bloody people peering down the business-end of something they don't know the state of and working the trigger hopefully to find out.

The very next person who tries something like that near me is going to get a right fucking talking-to.

(The cringe-and-duck thing? I can't not do it. It's ingrained behaviour and really, I'm not about to stop doing it.)

Comments

[whotheheckami.livejournal.com]

I can't state how strongly I agree with your sentiments. I learned fire arms safety at home on the farm, at cadets and in the RAF. I can't pick up a weapon (oo-err) without checking that it's in a safe condition.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree. It's just not something you do, real, fake, or otherwise, unless you have it pretty much dismantled.

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

It's not just you. I was minding the 'shooting shack' this afternoon and sharply instructed smalls to fire only in one direction (i.e. at the targets) and not to point gun-shaped things at each other.
Some steampunk fellamechap rocked up with his own nerf gun to have a go and did exactly the barrel squint you described. He got a lecture from me so short and sharp (and including the words 'fool' and 'example to children') that he asked if I was as drill sergeant for a day job!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

You'd think some of them would have clocked that if you want to look down the barrel of a gun you haven't personally made safe (without letting it out of your sight, either) you'd use a fucking mirror. Yes/no? (Digging splintered glass out of powder-burned fingers is likely to be unpleasant, but less so than the alternative.)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

It's probably not in the version of Gears of Warcraft they play. Maybe there's some 'downloadable content' where someone with the voice of R. Lee Emery tells them very loudly how not to be a danger to themselves and an embarrassment to all around them.

I can't speak about other weapons, but then general drill for checking shotgun barrels is to break the weapon open, at which point you'll find nothing, or the spent shells will spring past your right ear. Because obviously no-one is mental enough to leave the blasted thing lying about with a pair of live shells in situ.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Very fine indeed.

I have made this F-O because I fear some silly bugger might try to make this into something it's not.

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Fuck it, Darwinism in action. Yeah, there may be some mopping.

(low fools tolerance values today.)

[hsb.livejournal.com]

I did shooting at school*, and I don't remember anything about gun safety apart from that ever coming up, from anyone. I don't even remember how one makes a gun safe, so I'd be in the "don't touch, tell someone" brigade myself if I came across one. It's just not something many parents who doesn't know about guns themselves think about telling kids. But like white parents not talking about race, and car-drivers not talking about train safety, it's *bad* that this happens.

H

*until after a term the teacher ran off with someone else's wife, amid great scandal.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Quite.

And also quite obviously, unless it's a break-barrel weapon, peering up the business end will avail you naught because it's bloody dark. Mind, since these people don't know quite what they're looking for...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ye-es.

Or you could find the out-of-the-betacam version of the R. Budd Dwyer news conference. Which I really don't recommend.

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Oh, the one that Bryson references. No, I'm not hunting that one down.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I think that's it.

[Anecdote]

Years ago, I'd gone off with Pa and the head gamekeeper[1] to a Game Fair. (http://www.gamefair.co.uk/) While pottering about, we met one of the gamekeeper's chums + small child in pushchair. Small child is waving a toy rifle at people. Small child proceeds to load the toy rifle with imaginary shells before pretending to shoot us. So you can start as young as you like with the appropriate training.

[/Anecdote]


[1] And there goes what little 'street' 'cred' I had left...

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

A small child on a bus once pointed a toy gun at me and pretended to shoot me.

I fell off my seat and pretended to die.

Small child's face wore an expression of utter shock. Especially when I didn't get up for ages. I lay there just long enough for the 'Oh shit something has gone seriously wrong here' thought to form in small child's mind.

(It was a mostly empty bus, mind. I don't do things like that in front of toooo many people!)

[zotz]

To an extent, yes, although also bear in mind the generally safe assumption round here that anything firearm-shaped you just happen to come across can be guaranteed to be a toy, shotguns excepted. This being Britain. And my granddad's war trophy under the floorboards NOT BEING MENTIONED.

Yes, in principle they should have been more careful. In practice, though, they judged from context that these things were toys . . . and actually they were right. It's hard to say how many of them would have acted differently if it was a more plausible piece. Most of them, I'd hope, but you never can tell.

[margotmetroland.livejournal.com]

my very thoughts

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

When I was a kiddie I had a cap gun. It was quite an impressive item - a virtually full size cowboy-style revolver in chromed metal. I would buy a roll of caps at the toy shop in Prestbury High Street (now, almost inevitably, an estate agent). Caps were little dots of explosives on a thin strip of paper. I dunno if any of the above is still available, but these were common toys at the time.

Pulling the trigger would bring the hammer down on the cap in the firing position. There'd be an impressive bang and a cloud of pungent smoke. And - here comes the really good bit - the roll of caps would move forward so a fresh dot of explosive was positioned under the hammer. All done by springs and cogwheels. No batteries involved!

My parents always insisted that I must never point the gun at other people or myself (well, so much for or games of cops 'n' robbers), and I should NEVER look down the barrel. I remember remonstrating with them, "But nothing comes out of the barrel!" The danger area was at the other end, where the hammer came down on the caps, it always seemed to me.

But anyway. That was my earliest (and, indeed, only) tuition on firearms safety. And it's not like I've had occasion to handle guns much in my life, but on the odd occasions where I've touched a gun, I've instinctively - without even thinking about it - followed my parents' cap gun rules.

In other childhood safety memories, I remember my old infants' school headmistress, Miss Chew (it was almost too good to be true, but that was her real name) said we should always carry scissors in front of us, with the blades pointing inwards. That way, if we fell over, they wouldn't injure anyone. I can remember thinking, yes, but then we'd stab ourselves in the stomach! Even at the age of about seven I reckoned that I'd spotted the fatal flaw in that advice.

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

That is very fine. Did the parent notice?

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

!! The brownies taught me that you carry scissors pointing down (which is safe enough IMO)! Miss Chew sounds like a scary nutjob.

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

Good heavens. I've never had a proper gun lesson, but my brothers came back from the CCF and explained firmly to their little sister (aged about 6) that she should never point any gun at anybody unless she was prepared to shoot them, and she should never shoot anybody unless she was prepared to kill them. I was a little freaked out, but remembered. Oh, and also a little cross that I couldn't go to the CCF and have a go myself.

I have since learned that no, even blanks aren't safe, and yes, even the most highly-trained people make mistakes and actors do get killed on film sets.

So, erm, I totally agree with you. The best gun safety is good training.

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

She wasn't as scary as Mrs Ingram, one of my other teachers at the time.

Imagine a cross between Anne Widdecombe and Grandma in the Giles cartoons. That was her.

She was downright odd, and not in a nice way. She was grimly, aggressively odd, and she got worse with every term. Eventually she was eased out into retirement when her oddness became a little too extreme.

I remember telling my parents stories of some of her wild mood swings and bursts of scary illogic in the classroom. "Oh, yes," said my mum. "We always knew she was a bit like that."

Even at the time I thought, "And nobody did anything?" This teacher, steadily going mad in a possibly-threatening-the-children's-safety kind of way, and she was just allowed to continue? These days she'd have been OFSTED-ed out the door at a very early stage. But this was back in the early 1970s. Things were different then!

[jul1et.livejournal.com]

also up there with those idiots who will take a katana and *test* the blade with their thumb

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

I thought the approved method was to wave a hair gently over the blade...

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

I don't think they did. They seemed quite oblivious to what their child, or other bus passengers, were up to...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Well, ye-es. But even if the toy is one of those thing with a flag on a spring reading 'bang!' it'll give you a nasty poke in the eye.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

That's probably amazingly rude since you've just intimated that you don't think katana-making bloke has done a very good job. On the other hand, katana-making bloke has probably got a special brush and bucket for sweeping up the severed thumbs of the rude and careless.

[girfan.livejournal.com]

I remember those rolls of caps. If we didn't have a cap gun, we would sit with a roll on the cement steps with a sharp rock to make them explode. Great fun for small children!

[arkady.livejournal.com]

I have the same instinctive response to having anything resembling a weapon waved in my direction. Then again I did my stint in both the army & air cadets and have handled possibly more than my fair share of firearms since then - and round here, it could well be the real thing anyway. Usually it's an instinctive jerk to the side whilst closing the distance then slapping the offending item aside and letting rip verbally, fuelled with equal parts of fear and anger. I can't help it, it's pure instinct kicking in even if the barrel I've slapped aside is obviously plastic.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Did you happen to notice the bar posters?

[oryctolagus.livejournal.com]

Anyone who puts their fingers on a katana deserves to be cut with it. Fingerprints on the blade do so much damage.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Arkwright's Thermoseses? I did. :p

[steer.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've got to defend that initial behaviour as, in fact, both logical and reasonable. I remember once visiting some tall building (possibly the CN tower in Toronto) with a friend. It had a glass floor section. I was eager to walk over this. They said "it looks a bit chancy". I remarked "I'm pretty sure after the first four or five fell to their deaths they'd put up some cones."

But my basic point was that the glass floor section was likely subject to such over engineering that it was more safe than the regular floor. Similarly if some guns are on public display in a regular place I'm willing to bet that they've been so thoroughly checked that they're safer to fiddle with than any non gun bit of machinery you might care to handle.