Originally Posted by
TCinVA
The more you handle guns, the more likely you are to experience those kinds of issues.
Safety with a firearm has nothing to do with your background, education, training resume, status in society, or intellect.
Safety with a firearm is a process.
At any given moment someone is either demonstrating disciplined adherence to the primary rules of firearms safety, or they are not. At any given moment someone is either doing the safest, sanest thing possible with a deadly weapon, or they are not.
The instant someone strays from disciplined adherence to the principles of safely handling a firearm, that person is dangerous. That person is fractions of a second away from experiencing an unintentional discharge of a firearm and the potential consequences that go with it.
It doesn't matter what they were doing even three seconds ago. It doesn't matter what their job is, what level of training they have, how much money they make, what their IQ is, how big their youtube channel is, how many followers they have on Instagram, how many years service they have in an elite unit, how many championships they've won...the instant they stop obeying the process of safe handling practices they become a lethal menace to themselves and others.
Every single person who handles a firearm will, at some point, handle one negligently. The more you handle firearms the higher your risk of a bad outcome becomes.
Take reholstering as an example. In a typical year I will reholster a loaded handgun thousands of times. I can guarantee that in at least some of those instances I will make a mistake or experience something unexpected like a foreign object ending up in my holster. That's why I refuse to carry a handgun that doesn't give me some last ditch mechanical method of neutralizing the firing mechanism when I put the gun back in the holster.
There is actually an entire field of academic study centered on the propensity for error among human beings. Human beings commit far more errors than they can possibly keep account of in their daily activities. In some fields the consequences of human error are so severe that mitigation strategies must be used. Take surgery as an example. If you go in to have surgery on a limb, odds are that prior to your surgery a highly educated medical professional with years of experience is going to hand you a marker and ask you to mark the limb that is to be operated on. They will likely ask you for your name, your identifying information, and for what you are there to have done even though all of that is on a chart right in front of them.
This practice resulted from numerous instances where highly trained, highly experienced medical professionals performed the wrong procedures on the wrong limbs and even on the wrong patients.
In aviation, surgery, nuclear power, critical incident response in IT, and practically any other human endeavor you can name where an error brings a high likelihood of expensive and/or dangerous consequences, processes have been developed to attempt to minimize the occurrences of error and mitigate their ability to produce a negative outcome.
The point of training is to breed disciplined adherence to those processes even under extreme stress. Commercial and military aviators spend time every year in simulators where highly experienced aviators throw problems at them that they must resolve to keep their ratings to fly. Nuclear reactor operators go through the same process every year as well. All of this is designed to habituate disciplined adherence to a process of problem solving and safety even under extreme stress.
Safety with a firearm, like safety with a nuclear reactor or an aircraft, is not a passive process. Properly done, it is an active process where the person holding the firearm is making the safest, sanest decision they can under the circumstances they are facing at that moment. And when the circumstances change they change their behavior accordingly. A muzzle direction that is safe right now might not be safe in a second and a half...and the person holding the firearm needs to be sufficiently aware of what is happening to recognize that and do something about where their muzzle is oriented.
No human being will do that perfectly at all times. This is why we layer safety practices. The four primary rules of firearms safety layer on top of one another to create as much distance between human frailties and bad outcomes.
Sane engineering can add more layers between a mistake and a bad outcome because as effective as observance of the four primary rules of firearms safety is, no human being alive observes all of them all the time.
Clearing a Glock before taking it apart once isn't difficult. Ensuring that you have properly performed the steps necessary to safely clear the gun ten thousand times is another thing altogether. Ensuring that a police force of 40,000 people properly observes that process at least twice a year...well, you can see how the odds start to stack up on that.
Everyone understands how a moment or two of looking at a text while on the interstate piloting a minimum of 1.5 tons of steel going 75 MPH can result in someone being maimed or killed...and yet I'd wager you would have a dickens of a time finding a person who has a cell phone that never looked at a text under those circumstances. You might find picking winning lotto numbers or the next stock to jump 3,000% easier to do. Everyone also understands that the more miles you drive, the more likely you are to experience an accident.
Lethal mistakes with firearms are faster and easier than with vehicles. A small movement of the upper body while holding a handgun can sweep an entire line of people and if a bullet leaves that muzzle nobody can see it and get out of the way in time.
If we have a proper understanding of the risks, we can take measures to mitigate them. But that doesn't happen if we don't honestly assess ourselves, our equipment, and our circumstances.
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