I feel your pain, Sisyphus.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 Filed in: Techniques & Training, General gun stuff, Current Events

First, please read this sad story over at Xavier's place. When you're done, come back and we'll talk about it a bit.

I wasn't going to comment on the tragedy, but I simply can't ignore it. I'm so tired of reading this kind of story, and I'm even more tired of the shooting community failing - in many cases, simply refusing - to do anything about the situation.

(For some background, please read my article "On Safety." It lays out my arguments, which I will be referencing in these comments.)

Note that Joshua had in fact completed a gun safety course. I can almost guarantee you that his instructor taught him not just Traditional Rule #1, but the very worst, most ignorant, most negligent version of that rule: "all guns are always loaded, until you've verified that they aren't."

What leads me to that conclusion? Simple - I've demonstrated that people feel free to do stupid things with guns that they think are unloaded. The caption to one of Joshua and Alaina's pictures, according to Xavier, said "We triple checked to make sure ALL of the guns were unloaded!"

There, ladies and gentlemen, lies the proof. They did just what their instructor had told them: they checked to make sure that their guns were unloaded, and once that was accomplished they were completely at ease doing (and chronicling) stupid things with them. Monumentally stupid things. That caption says, in effect, "it's OK - we're doing just as we were told."

As a result, a beautiful young woman lies in the cold, hard ground.

In my view, Traditional Rule #1 is more than partly responsible for her death, because it set up the circumstances under which it could happen. It created a mindset that wasn't devoted to safety, but in fact evasive of it. It gave Joshua a mental "out": "I thought it was unloaded!"

Understand this: I think Xavier is a great blogger, a fellow with whom I agree on so many topics. He deserves kudos for putting this story together, but this time his conclusion is dead wrong. He posits that had Joshua and Alaina just followed the rules more closely, this tragedy wouldn't have happened.

My rejoinder is that they did just as they were taught; it's not that they had any lack of adherence. They followed the rules, starting with Traditional Rule #1, just like they were supposed to. If you've read the article I referenced earlier, you know why I believe Traditional Rule #1 abrogates all of the other rules, setting up situations just like this one. It did not prevent this tragedy, any more than it has prevented any of the others I've written about.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Simply repeating Traditional Rule #1, in a progressively louder voice, isn't working. It can't. Isn't it time we did something better?

-=[ Grant ]=-

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