This is one of those things which, no matter how much you want to remain impassive you end up breaking in laughter.

Excuse me while I wipe the spittle off my screen.

Everyday, No Days Off bring us this sad video from Esquire Magazine. The image is a capture of the video and to look at it gives any half assed gun enthusiast a major OMFG headache.

After ingesting a couple of Excedrin and ignoring the obvious stupidity, I checked the video once more and noticed the nice gun sweeps that the beautiful woman from ATF does to herself drawing the “Glock & Wesson”….

And then reholstering it.

And one has to wonder who was her firearms instructor. Could it be…

Nah! It would be too damn easy.

Not Safe For Work or conductive to a good digestion.

Welcome to Miami’s Trail Glade range, the new Gansta Paradise. I am fuming 5 kinds of color smoke over the irresponsibility of the Range Master or whoever was stupid enough not to stop this video while on the making.

No, it is not that I disagree with the Right of the Tattooed Morons to Free Speech through Rap, but the insanity of the piss poor weapons handling and lack of Gun Safety both inside the range and the parking lot is appalling. This is a range that just recently finished a first phase multi million dollar renovation after almost a decade of lobbying by all shooting clubs of the area (we are still waiting for shooting bays for the Action Shooting Sports) and it is not good for the image of Miami-Dade County and the Shooting community in general that this range does not practice or enforce Gun Safety.

I’ve been told that some employees of the Range are somewhat nervous that the video hit Youtube. That tells me that the level of brain power running Trail Glades is not very high because everything video ends up in Youtube in these days of that thing called the Internet. Afraid for their jobs in this bad economic times? I am more afraid that the range I visit regularly is not safe for my fellow shooters and myself.

If you are a shooter live in the Tetra-County area (or even if you are just a pissed off fellow shooter), you may want to contact Miami Dade Country Parks & Recreation and leave a piece of your mind.  I already did and then some.

If you own or are a member of a shooting club in any specialty, the safety of its members is paramount. I don’t have to tell you this since we in the culture had made it a mantra and, let’s face it, we do a great job beating the Four Rules into people’s mind. Our Clubs insurance carrier will gladly renew our policy because our great track record but will refuse to insure “less dangerous” sports such as Paintball because their participants keep getting injured. However, a while back I was spectacularly reminded of Einstein’s quote: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

In the last year or so, we received an influx of new shooters to our club interested in shooting IDPA. Lots of them were almost literally people that just bought a gun for the first time and got tired real quick of a static range shooting one round per second with no movement.  Thanks to two great members who came up and implemented a new New Shooter Program where ANYBODY shooting with us for the first time must go through a safety briefing and a gun proficiency test before being allowed to shoot a match (And I don’t care if you returned from overseas and were team leader of Gamma 58 Anti Terrorist Squad). Some of the stuff you are checked on covers drawing and holstering the weapon safely, parts of the gun, shooting itself, reloads, etc. Shooters have been turned away because they were considered too green and were recommended to take a basic pistol class before coming back, some had good basic skills were too Rambo and too “I know my shit. I am the New Ninja” and told thanks but no thanks. Those who demonstrated safety and willingness but were still green, were allowed to shoot under the official care of a Safety Officer but really the whole squad usually mentors the shooter. Some find out that that IDPA is not for them and God Bless them. We encourage them to seek other disciplines and let them know our door is open for them at any time but to keep shooting! Most get hooked and have a blast after their first match and want to do it all over again the next day… which we would like to do, but gun ranges in South Florida are premium contested real space. At the end, we have new safe shooters… or so we thought.

A New Shooter who went through the Safety chat & evaluation and actually shot one stage decided to go to the Safety Area and practice his reloads. Now our Safety Area like any Safety Area anywhere else doe not allow ammunition to be handled. And to reinforce the rule, we have a huge sign that gives you the damn rules on what to do and what not to do plus the Four Rules of Gun Safety.  So next thing we hear is a BANG from the Safety Area and a very surprised New Shooter. An Safety Officer and myself were standing nearby (but unfortunately not paying enough attention before the incident), rushed towards the guy and told him to put the weapon down on the table. The guy turns towards us, still dazed and we get a nice sweep of what afterward turned out to be a gun with a round in the pipe. Yeah… bowel loosening time. Gun was secured and shooter was then sent to talk with the two Safety Officers who gave him the initial briefing & evaluation. After the chat was over, the shooter was DQed for the rest of his natural life and asked not to return. I don’t know if he felt he “knew” how to handle guns and thought himself above our silly regulations or was just a plain combination of overconfidence with absent mindedness sprinkled with stupidity. The end result was a Negligent Discharge and that cannot be tolerated.

I know that there are two kinds of shooters: Those who had an ND and those who will. I know some will say that we were a bit harsh on the guy and we should give him another chance. If it was a one on one situation in the middle of the sticks with a guy who was new to guns, maybe. But we had some 60+ shooters that day mingling around plus some wives & kids. As a Club, we have to be responsible all those lives and stupidity cannot be forgiven. I rather have somebody with a bruised ego than a gunshot wound.

So, to summarize a very long winded post, when it comes to Gun Safety there is no such thing as shortcuts, carelessness or in our case thinking people will follow Gun Safety rules all the time and that we should trust and relax. We learned a lesson on the cheap.