My Favorite Threeper is now in full fledged Verbal Defiance Against The Man! And I am apparently the Man. Our club has been blessed with a great amount of new shooters wanting to try IDPA. A sizable number of these new shooters have very little experience with handguns and even though our cadre of New Shooter counselors have been doing a heck of a job, there has been a couple of incidents that forced us to revise and tighten the range rules. The new rule that Mr. Threeper finds insulting to his individual freedoms is that we are not allowing any ammo whatsoever in the Safe Area. Initially the rule stated that there would be no ammo manipulation in the Safe Area which allowed the shooter to carry the ammo in magazines or speed loaders as long as they remained in the pouches firmly attached to the shooter. But after a couple of booboos and an AD, the Board of Directors decided that in order to avoid the experience of having somebody test in the flesh the effectiveness of QuikClot or Celox during a match, the old rule had to be tightened to its new form.

Mr. Threeper basically blew a fuse and made no bones about it in the club’s forum. His latest rant went like this:

ok. this is not a suggestion. i’m on record. repeal this stupid rule. it’s dumb. it’s a collectivist approach to controlling the behavior of the individual. that can’t be done. i assure you. as an example, try to control me. just try. it can’t be done.

Anarchy is all cute and well when you are 19 and still living with Mom and Dad, but it has no place in a gun range., specially when you have new shooters who are not yet experienced enough not only to be 100% safe but quickly recognize when something is about to go wrong and take proper action to avoid it. Injecting politics in a subject that clearly is uncalled for is stupid in so many levels many have troubles understanding this individual and it is exponentially stupid in a club whose membership includes people of many political views, races and brands of cigars (Forget about 9mm v .45, You should see some of the cigar discussions about lengths, girths, country of origin and even wrapping.)

And yes, I wish that all our shooters were proficient enough we could have a hot range and did not have to keep an eye on everybody and make sure they were not about to give somebody else a ballistic piercing, but life suck and you must make do. We have plenty shooters that I feel comfortable enough around them they could carry their gun and manipulate ammo around me and I know they will be safe, but I also know some shooters still require that extra help and they must be brought along till they reach that level of safety. We tout ourselves as a teaching club and as such we must teach that Gun Safety comes first and that goes well above politics, conspiracy theories and the suspicion that the Trilateral Commission is paying me big bucks to disperse mind control devices among the club members.