OSD 314: Safety is good actually
You know how when you’re reading about bygone eras, you get to laugh at the unsafe things they did? Things like using X-ray machines to see how your shoes fit or taking mercury to cure constipation and syphilis. The people who did those things weren’t dumb, but they didn’t know better.
What do we do today that falls into the same bucket? Plastic contamination is heating up as a source of future facepalms. So is indoor air quality:
Gun culture has gone through safety-related transitions before. Here’s a picture of John Browning:
Here’s one of Elmer Keith:
For most of the 20th century, trigger discipline was not a thing. It’s not that people just ignored it. It’s that they hadn’t even discovered the concept of trigger discipline.
Ditto eye protection. Ear protection was a thing, but until the ‘70s it was considered to be strictly for pantywaists. Properly securing firearms away from children and curious guests is also a relatively new phenomenon. These things have paid off:
Jeff Cooper’s four rules of gun safety are probably responsible for that. Not so much because of their exact details (people can and do reasonably quibble about that), but because Cooper introduced gun safety as a cultural expectation. His idea was to turn gun safety from a vague “be careful” to a repeatable series of exact steps — with the promise that if you follow these steps, you absolutely, positively will not have an accident. Culturally, that set a much higher bar for what the gun community thought of as safe gun handling. For more on that, see these two past editions of the newsletter:
OSD 220: The evolution of what’s culturally unthinkable
Last week we discussed the concept of “technically possible but culturally unthinkable”. The takeaway was that if you want to reduce violence, the biggest wins are to be had by shaping what’s culturally unthinkable, not on (quixotically) trying to shape what’s technically possible.
Let’s fast forward this. We got into guns because we want to be safe and live long, healthy lives. So if anything about gun ownership is working against that goal, it’s a good idea to fix it. In 100 years, what about 2025-era gun ownership will people look back on as obvious improvements we should have made? Some ideas:
Lung protection
If you shoot more-than-rarely at an indoor range, you probably have elevated blood lead levels. It enters your body through your lungs after being vaporized from primers and potentially from bullets. The same risk exists when shooting outdoors, but it’s somewhat mitigated by being in open air. Still not good if you’re shooting a lot though, especially with a suppressor. In the future, people may start wearing masks to do serious shooting, especially indoors.
Skin and mucus membrane protection
Lead also enters your body through your skin. Either directly through absorption, or indirectly when it gets on your hands and then you touch your eyes, nose, mouth, or food. You know when your suppressor gasses you out and your eyes start watering? A bunch of lead just entered your body. Wash your hands or use lead-removing wipes after a range trip. Change out of your clothes too, since they’ll be covered in the same dust.
Suppressors
Normally you get to complain that it’s unconstitutional to be required to use a particular safety device. Suppressors are the rare case where you get to complain about being unconstitutionally prevented from using a safety device.
Medical equipment
Consider it malpractice to be on the range without a med kit. Even in your EDC, statistically you’re more likely to eventually use a tourniquet than a gun. So if you carry a gun, you should probably carry a tourniquet too. Medical equipment has gained a lot of momentum over the past 5-10 years, and lots of shooters have all the right gear. The next step is to make sure you know how to use it, and do some dry runs with your kit to shake out bugs.
Suicide prevention
This one is tougher, because there isn’t a ready solution. So unlike the ideas above, there isn’t a tidy sentence to write like “In 100 years, everyone will obviously do X, so why not just start doing X now?” But it is a large unsolved problem, and it is worth solving. So it’s worth mentioning.
Other ideas?
What other ideas do you have? What do we do in 2025’s gun culture and gun gear that people in 2125 will make fun of us for?
This week’s links
TFB’s James Reeves interviews the CEO of HK USA
Impressively candid.
Timeline of foreign censorship laws
That’s the title, but you could cut “foreign” from it because a lot of these end up being de facto law in the US. Useful context for what goes on inside social media companies.
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Great work, as usual, with a caveat. I don’t have the data handy, but I suspect the decline in unintentional firearms deaths precedes Jeff Cooper and 1980. I suspect it goes back into the 1940s with hunter safety education (thanks NRA!). I am reminded of the NRA’s gun safety video from 1946, “Trigger Happy Harry.” See: https://gunculture2point0.com/2018/12/06/enjoy-a-national-rifle-association-gun-safety-video-from-1946/
> What do we do today that falls into the same bucket? Plastic contamination is heating up as a source of future facepalms. So is indoor air quality:
Long time ago, I was always super sleepy in my office, so I bought a $50 CO2 monitor. I measured between 1500-1800 ppm in that office. OSHA requirements are that it should never exceed 1200. Nobody cared
Since then, I always take readings. CO2 levels inside are waaaaay higher than they should be, almost everywhere. Keep a window open if you can, at all times