Identifying a disturbing connection
Last week, I was reflecting on the shotgun courses I have taken in the past as a student. As I was going through my personal class notes from the past 10 years, specific memories about each course I had taken started coming back to me. I began to think about the people I met and the specific drills that each company utilized.
I found two courses that had one thing in common: a student had a negligent discharge with a shotgun at a downward angle near their feet. Thankfully, neither of these instances resulted in injury to the student, but it was significant enough that I took notes about it during the class. In all of the other shotgun classes I have taken as a student, I had never seen someone have a negligent discharge near their feet with a shotgun.
As I began to think about these two instances, I realized that both of these classes had one thing in common:
They ran a cold range.
The Cold Range
Essentially, running a cold range is a method where, each time the student is done shooting the drill, they unload the firearm and leave it unloaded until the next drill. In both of these shotgun classes, the students were instructed to unload at the end of each drill, leave their shotguns on the firing line, and go back to the rest of their support gear to grab more ammunition, drink water, etc. The problem here isn’t necessarily the unloaded shotgun — it’s how the student treats the firearm when they come back to the firing line. If you treat unloaded guns differently from loaded guns, this becomes a problem when you pick up the shotgun and it wasn’t unloaded after the previous drill. It creates a Hot/Cold range. We refer to this as a Katy Perry range.
This is exactly what happened in both of these shotgun courses. For most of the class, students were instructed to unload the shotgun after each drill. However, there was at least one time in each class that students were just told to place the shotgun on the ground without unloading. When both students came back to the firing line and picked up the shotgun, they were under the impression it was unloaded, and they began to violate at least one of the four firearms safety rules. You can guess what happened next.
The solution
The best way to “treat all guns as if they are loaded” is to leave them loaded whenever possible. Running a hot range is the best way to achieve this during a class. If your instructor tells you that he or she runs a cold range because the students aren’t capable of carrying around loaded guns — I would hire another instructor.
With all of the courses that I have taken, the most nervous I have ever felt on the firing line was during courses that ran a cold range.
5 Responses
Although I am ashamed to admit it in my 45+ years of shooting, competing, instructing, etc. I have had a few erroneous, accidental, etc. discharges. Fortunately no one was hurt. I will say that in each case the gun was “unloaded.” So I’ll suggest that the point made in this article has a great deal of validity.
I will point out that when competing almost all the time the firing string will end with the commands, “show clear, slide forward, hammer down, holster.” This leaves all the guns unloaded. What to do about these situations I am at a loss to say.
In a current set of classes/practice sessions/etc. I am generally ending each firing string with these commands resulting in all guns being unloaded. In these situations the “empty” guns are always holstered with all participants directed that under no circumstances are they to remove their guns from the holster unless directed to do so by a safety officer on the firing line. But this article gives me pause and I’ll have to re-think how I’m going to handle these classes. Thanks for making me think about these situations.
An instructor I greatly admire makes this point:
I won’t be on the street with you every day as you carry to see that you are doing it safely. If you can’t safely control a weapon *on the range* then how can you POSSIBLY be considered safe to carry one on the streets?
His point, of course, is to learn *and utilize* safe gun handling skills ALL THE TIME.