Haven't been shot yet.
So that leads into...
Idiots at the Range:
A month or so ago, I was at the range with Ardi along with another person who wanted to learn how to shoot---or at least, get an introduction to firearms safety and handling.
The pistol section at our range contains 7 different pistol bays, four of which are about 20 yards wide, and 25 yards deep. The 5th and 6th bays are about 30 yards wide, and 50 yards deep, and the seventh bay is a little larger than the first four. The bays all have a table plus miscellaneous barrels and such, but bay 5 also has three shooting benches. (Bay 2, on this day, also had a shooting bench on it.) This is all relevant, by the way.
So, Ardi was taking up approximately 1/3 of the bay, teaching Anna the basics of safety and handling, and I took up the other 2/3, practicing some movement/reloading drills for USPSA competition shooting. We were spread out over two of the three shooting benches, but clearly taking up the entire bay, with our shooting line 10 feet or so forward or the shooting benches due to the fact that I was moving.
We had been shooting for not very long when a pair of older males (I’m not going to say “gentlemen”) drove up, parked in front of our bay, and watched for a little while, then got out of their car and started putting shooting materials on the third shooting bench.
When I noticed this, I told them that we were likely to be here for awhile. They replied “That’s okay, we don’t mind” which seemed an odd answer to me, but I had let them know so I went back to practicing, checking on Ardi and Anna periodically. (They were doing just fine without me.) Remember, there are 6 other bays available, none of which were in use.
After a bit, I noticed that the two men had put together a target stand, and had walked it off to the side of the bay, with the target about in line with where Anna, Ardi, and I were standing. Somewhere in there they had also taken out a small array of handguns (handling them on the shooting bench behind us as opposed to in the safety area) and placed them on the shooting bench.
Wondering what they thought they were doing, I stopped shooting and just watched them, while Ardi and Anna kept up their shooting practice, which was mostly in front of that third bench. Here’s the layout:
The little rectangles are the targets, and I was moving back and forth within the fault lines I had set down, and Ardi and Anna were shooting at their own respective targets. The red rectangle is approximately where the two guys had placed their target—slightly forward of Ardi and Anna, but not by much.As I watched, the two guys picked up handguns from the table (behind Ardi and Anna) and walked towards their target. As they do this, one guy swings his gun from pointing downward, to pointing upward. Again---Ardi and Anna were in front of him. At this point I start yelling “Stop, hold it, hold it!”
The two guys stop, and the guy holding the gun pointing upward swings it BACK DOWNWARD, again, through the area where Ardi and Anna are standing. He then looks at me and says “What?!”
I tell him he needs to watch where he is pointing the gun, it isn’t safe, and he replies “It’s empty!” I tell him that he shouldn’t be pointing the gun at people downrange, whereupon he swings it upward AGAIN, saying “I angled it outward so it wasn’t pointing at anyone!”
Things go downhill from there.
I should say that our range has specific rules that no guns are to be handled unless on the firing line, or in the safety area, and that no guns should be handled when people are downrange.
Jumping over the sections where he argued with me that 1)the gun was unloaded, so it wasn’t dangerous, 2) he hadn’t pointed it up and down again, and 3) well, if he did, he angled it outward so it was safe, 4) I didn’t understand because he was there to practice COMBAT shooting, not COMPETITION shooting (his emphasis, not mine), and 5) that I was an asshole---after that particular sequence of brilliance, I asked him to shoot in a different bay.
Here is where it started to get beyond stupidly dangerous to flat out stupidly STUPID. (Note how I’m ignoring the Combat vs Competition thing he brought up? Big of me, don’t you think?)
He said “What, we can’t use this bay?” I replied that there were 6 other empty bays he could use. Apparently, though, he wanted THIS one, and the fact that it was already in use didn’t matter. He did some yelling, and called me an asshole (again) to the Range Officer who had come by and saw it all, complained about more things, said he was handicapped and needed the shooting benches (which, I’ll note, he hadn’t been using---and I’d seen him at the range before shooting a number of times) and that there was something wrong with me for asking him to move from the range he wanted.
It was---fairly unbelievable. Seriously. Through it all, the idiot didn’t believe that he had done anything unsafe! He apologized, in this fashion “I’m sorry for whatever you think I did” –and somehow expected me to both accept that, and let him shoot on the same bay with us. He didn’t see a single problem with any of his gun-handling on the bay, when he pointed a gun 3 times at Ardi and Anna.
You know what? I am NOT going to get shot because someone else doesn’t have the brains to realize they have no idea what they are doing. And once people demonstrate that they are not going to be reasonable, I see no reason to engage further in discussion with them.
You aren’t safe, you don’t understand the problem, and won’t listen to an explanation of the problem? Fine. Go away, and shoot someone else.
But not me. And not the people I’m shooting with.
(I’ll note that as he finally moved to a different bay, he told the Range Officer that he was going to report this at the next meeting of our club, and have disciplinary procedures started. I started laughing at that point, because that would have been great! ---Because the RO had already mentioned to me that several other people in the past had reported safety issues with this guy before. Unfortunately, the guy was all mouth and no follow-through, so he never brought it up.)
So--if you are at the range sharing a bay with someone, then obey the safety rules. If that is too much for you, go shoot somewhere else---because no one wants to get shot due to your stupidity.
No comments:
Post a Comment