I don’t accept things like bore-checking to be violations of the rules because in doing so you have something in the chamber (your finger, a piece of paper, or a borelight) that is not a fireable bullet, and the worst that could happen is you tap the butt of the AR on something and the finicky bolt release disengages with your pinky finger in the chamber. Or something like that *looks around nervously*.

Dry firing makes me paranoid and nervous though, and it should, but I do it anyways and take the heightened alert level as a measure of safety. If I didn’t do it, I’d be an absolutely lousy shot, because I get to actually shoot much more rarely than you’d think one who works in a gun shop/range would.

Let me tell you something: it is a fact that the Beretta on my desk is not loaded. I know this to a complete certainty. That is possible. To my mind, holding to a “rule” as in the topmost blockquoted section of this post is just as arbitrary and ridiculous as the hoplophobes whole side of life, and that includes the so-called “PR” aspects of it. To appeal to irrationality with irrationality is a howling irrationality.

I was going to come back and add something like that, Rustmeister

You can call me Rusty.

Okay, don’t have time for a response right now. Of course you guys would do this on an unusually busy Friday.

Rustmeister Says:

Yeah, but doing any of those things outside of the gun community should be frowned upon.

Maybe I should have added that I (now at least) never break the rules for the totally unbiased mainstream media. Because they lie. Because they distort. Because they take unflattering photographs of people they hate at inopportune moments like when they are coughing or straighting their tie and run them, repeatably. Because they think we don’t notice. Because other people probably don’t notice.

I understand this. But let me briefly tell you a story. I was a late blooming gun enthusiast. Around my 22nd birthday, a friend went over the four rules, showed me the negligent discharge hole in the ceiling drywall (with the date and some other guy’s name written and circled for posterity), and then immediately showed me how to lock open the action of a Garand, verify the chamber was empty and no clip was present, and preceded to showed me what a mint bore looks like.

Although that was all pretty cool, My brain was screaming Does Not Compute!

(shameless plug) Here’s another old gun safety blog entry.

If we did that, we wouldn’t have any Bruce Willis movies.

you say that like it’s a bad thing.

I’ve always thought of it as a logical conditioner. “All guns are loaded” means that guns are, by definition, loaded. As Cooper himself noted, there is no reason to think of a gun as being unloaded, or even consider having an unloaded gun around. When unloaded, it’s not a gun.

We also attempt to follow the other rules when messing around with a gun-shaped lump of metal and wood, simply because it’s good practice, of course – that’s true whether we’re talking a Kimber 1911 or a Tokyo Marui airsoft pistol. And we check if a lump is loaded whenever it could possibly be loaded because we need to know if we have a gun on our hands.

Admittedly, I’m more a knife nut, and I know this isn’t how Cooper thought of the material (since he wasn’t proud of the pictures of himself pointing a gun at a camera), but it seems an effective way of working.

It still could be considered bad PR, but to be honest, they didn’t need a Lumpy to get a random image of a gun nut.