Gun Nuts Media

Do you live somewhere cold? In Indianastan right now it’s somewhere around 300 degrees below zero, which usually means AlGore is in town. All that aside though, the cold weather can play havoc with your carry gun. Sure, you might be able to get your gloved finger inside the trigger guard, but that’s only half the battle. The place where gloves can really mess things up is on the trigger reset.

This past weekend I was out at Eagle Creek pistol range in Indianapolis, freezing to death. With temps in the high 20s, I did 95% of my shooting with the gloves on. While shooting my 625, which had a generous trigger guard, I noticed that even on that platform the gloves caused issues with the reset. The fastest way to shoot a DA revolver is to come completely off the trigger and let the reset spring do its job without manual interference. When wearing gloves, even my thin Blackhawk winter gloves, they added just enough width to my index finger that I couldn’t bounce off the trigger as far as I’d like, and found myself short stroking the trigger a couple of times. I did not have the same problem with the Jetfire, as the much shorter resert on the pocket gun allowed me to get a clean reset every time.

That’s why it’s so important to practice with your carry gun in your regular clothing. If you wear gloves, you need to shoot with those gloves on. Fabric can mess up resets, interfere with the slide, and do a lot of surprising things that you don’t expect…unless you get out there and do some shooting.

Or in this case, magnetism?  Now can we say that ToddG has a magnetic personality?

“They’re more like guidelines, anyway!” Are the 4 Rules of gun safety, as given by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai Jeff Cooper really as sacrosanct as some people claim they are?  Recent controversies across the gunblog world have sparked this train of thought on how quick we are as a community to point and holler “they have their finger on the trigger” or “she’s muzzling people with that gun“.  In both of those linked instances, those people would be correct: the SniperBabes have several pictures that are in clear violation of Rule 3, and even Breda is clearly violating Rule 2 in that video.  So technically, the people that called them out for those violations of The 4 Rules are quite correct if you’re holding to the letter of the law.

But the letter of the law isn’t really adequate to address real life.  If you’ve ever met a serious gun owner that claims to have never violated one of the 4 Rules in his or her life, that person has either owned guns for less than a day, or they’re a liar.  The 4 Rules are actually elegant in that you need to be breaking at least two of them simultaneously for something bad to happen, and yet we insist as a community on a treating them as though they were rigid doctrine to never be violated.  The truth is, we all break the 4 Rules regularly.

• Dry fire practice?  You’re breaking Rule 1 for sure, and most likely Rule 3 as well.
• Holstering in an IWB holster?  Good chance to break Rule 2.

The list goes on and on and on and on and on; but the point isn’t to say that the 4 Rules aren’t good, or that we shouldn’t be following the 4 Rules.  They are, and we should, because adherence to the 4 Rules of gun safety does in fact prevent accidents that could lead to injury or loss of life.  The problem is when we treat the 4 Rules as though they’re religious dogma – they’re not.  They’re more like guidelines than rules, because rigid sets of rules can’t always apply in the real world.  Look at the two examples above, especially the video in Breda’s post.  Is there a rule violation?  You bet.  At any time, was that gun being handled in an unsafe manner or were people in danger?  Not even for a split second.

The 4 Rules: they’re great, but like any set of guidelines, they’re not perfect.  Once we start acting like we live in a vacuum where we can always apply rigid rules, the 4 Rules then become a crutch for people to escape critical thinking.  That’s the most important safety, after all.  No set of rules, no mechanical safety is ever going to be a replacement for good critical thinking and reasoning skills.