IMPROPER MUZZLE DISCIPLINE

Rule # 2 : Never let the muzzle cover anything that you are not prepared to destroy.

This seems pretty cut and dried right?

I mean seriously!  Who would ever carelessly point a gun at someone?  Especially at the range?

Yeah.

(Con’t Reading from here)

I have had the displeasure of looking down the barrel of our Glocks at Artemis numerous times.

Before each group session we go over the four safety rules.  Everyone nods in agreement.  We mention that people tend to get excited after one of our simulations and tend to point the gun at places they shouldn’t.

The experienced shooters chuckle knowing they would never do that!  The new shooters just kind of stare at us wondering how anyone would be so stupid!

Then they get into their first force on force engagement.

Something seems to happen when a trainee finishes their first simulated deadly force encounter.  Once the scenario ends they seem to forget that they are holding a weapon in their hand and they begin to wave it around pointing it at anything and everything.

As you can imagine this is a potentially catastrophic.

It also can reinforce negative training scars.

The more you perform an action the more ingrained it becomes to muscle memory.

There is a famous story about a police officer that wanted to practice gun take away drills.  His department did not offer the training so he was on his own.  He bought a blue gun (an inert training gun) and had his wife point the gun at him.  He would take it from her then return it to her to try again…. and again… and again.

Eventually he found himself on duty with an assailant pointing a gun at him.  He quickly initiated his training and took the gun from the assailant.  Then… as a result of some massive negative training scars… handed the gun back to him.  (Fortunately, his partner was there to stop anything really bad from happening from the threat who I can only assume had a look of massive surprise and shock on his face.)

We must take our training seriously…. all aspects of it.  Muzzle discipline reminds us that we are in fact training and building skill sets.