by Bradley Henderson
Rules of Gun Safety
I grew up around guns and served in the military for a dozen years where I deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Through all of this, gun safety was drilled into me. It was second nature. If you own guns, they should be drilled into you, too. The basic rules of gun safety are:
- Treat every weapon as if it were loaded.
- Never point a weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot.
- Keep your finger straight and off the trigger until you are ready to fire.
- Keep your weapon on safe until you intend to fire.
- Know your target and what’s behind it.
You have to break multiple rules before someone gets hurt.
As a civilian criminal defense attorney, I have represented multiple clients charged with the unlawful discharge of a firearm (see Utah Code § 76-10-508). Many of these clients also knew gun safety but found themselves in the terrible situation of accidentally or negligently discharging a firearm. This often results in criminal charges and losing the firearm. Many of these accidents involve function testing a gun after cleaning it.
Function Testing
After disassembling and reassembling a gun, it is common to test it to make sure it was put back together correctly. This involves pulling the trigger and cycling the action a few times to see if everything works. This is when people very familiar with gun safety are surprised by a gunshot and then find the police at their door asking what happened. This is obviously a situation you want to avoid.
Avoiding a Negligent Discharge or Hurting Someone When Function Testing
Never clean a gun with ammunition or a magazine in the room:
Unload the gun in one room and them move to another room to disassemble and clean the gun. When you are familiar with firearms, it is easy to follow muscle-memory and place the magazine in the gun after it is fully assembled. This leaves the gun with an empty chamber but a loaded magazine. Then, when you check to see if it is unloaded before function testing, you put a round in the chamber but don’t know it. Then, when you function test the gun, it goes bang.
Before pulling the trigger in a function test, check to see if the gun is loaded at least three times:
If you absent mindedly placed a loaded magazine in the gun when reassembling it, you will know after the second time you check to see if it’s empty because an unspent round will fly out.
Never pull the trigger on a function test unless the gun is pointed at something you don’t care about:
No one is perfect, and one day you might make a mistake. I usually point the gun at my lawn. If for some reason you did not follow the previous two steps correctly, at least you will know the bullet only hit the ground and not a person. It is not uncommon for someone to have a negligent discharge and see the bullet went into a neighbor’s house. This often results in the person calling the police on themselves to make sure their neighbors are okay. .
Conclusion
These additional rules are really just doubling down on the original five rules of gun safety by making sure the gun is absolutely not loaded before testing it after cleaning, and then making sure any negligent discharge is just into the ground. Gun safety starts with good training. If you have never taken a gun safety course and you own guns, you really should. You can’t know too much or be too safe with guns. And if you have been charged with negligent discharge of a firearm, you need an attorney with experience with both criminal law and guns. You can find that here at Stone Rive Law.