No matter how accustomed to the feel of your pistol you become, carrying a firearm is an active responsibility. Wearing the weapon means you are either ready to defend yourself and others or you’re a danger to yourself and others. Drinking and partying is a great way to lose sight of the responsibility carrying a firearm represents, but even sober people can forget about the dangers of irresponsibility when firearms are involved. When you carry a firearm, you need to stay cognizant of it always.
If you can’t do that, don’t carry.
Trigger discipline
So, you’ve already made some bad choices: you wore a crappy holster, had a few drinks, started showing off your dance moves and dropped your pistol in front of everyone. Things couldn’t get any worse, right? Your training tells you to regain control of the weapon as quickly as possible, your embarrassment tells you to try to play it cool. So, you let those competing instincts dictate your actions, and —
You shoot a guy because you grabbed the weapon by the trigger?
Trigger discipline is, in my opinion, probably the most important skill you need to develop when dealing with firearms. Guns come in all sorts of shapes and colors, but the mechanism remains pretty much the same. Pulling the trigger makes it go bang, so keep your damn finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire. It’s among the four firearm safety rules we bash into the heads of Marine recruits for a reason: not shooting someone is really easy to do. All you have to do is not pull the trigger.
Again, we’re not talking advanced FBI training courses here, we’re talking firearm community college 101 level stuff.
Take responsibility
In just 11 seconds, this video manages to make me angry about a dozen times, and the ending is no exception. After discharging his weapon into a crowded room, this break dancing FBI agent doesn’t immediately rush to assess the injury to the man he just caused, nor does he even really seem to acknowledge what happened. Instead, he tucks the pistol back into his holster and raises his hands as if to say “whoops” before just walking away casually in another direction.
Here’s another angle that shows his dismissal of the incident.
This is where my contempt for this guy transitions out of “everyone should know better” territory and into the realm of “you were trained differently.” Admittedly, I’ve never served in law enforcement, but I was a part of an anti-terrorism team in Southern California that trained with personnel from the LAPD SWAT team. Those men were professionals that, despite carrying weapons on them at almost all times, treated each of them with the respect that they deserved.
A weapon was just fired in a crowded nightclub. A man was shot. And this FBI agent just walks away casually.
Nothing to see here.
Once again, as I’ve written so many times on SOFREP, training is important — but it doesn’t make decisions for you. You don’t have to have the best training in the world to be a safe and responsible firearm owner, just like you can be a completely irresponsible one despite receiving the training. The choice is yours.
Image courtesy of YouTube
COMMENTS