Comic Strips

As I mentioned, I held a gun long ago handed to me by a marine doing a demo on a decommissioned carrier. He did not give me any kind of extensive training in the safety of the 92FS or any cautions about edge case safety concerns. I didn’t check the chamber, or know how to. In holding it horizontally within a metal ship, it’s not impossible that a misfire from the direction I held it could have ricocheted off walls and hurt someone. While I knew not to touch the trigger, he didn’t instruct me as such.

Just because you and some guy who eats crayons didn't observe gun safety properly on a boat one time doesn't mean gun safety isn't important, accidents happen when people get complacent like that and can happen at any "skill" level or whatever you want to call it. He was wrong not to show you and insist on safety, and frankly you should always ask "how do I clear this" when touching a gun you don't know how to use.

I'm literally shitting in a gun store as I write this and when I walked by the FFL desks otw to the shitters they had something out I wanted to check out, so I walked up to the guy holding it, said "ooh lemme see," he made sure it was clear in front of me, passed it to me, I double checked, and then proceeded to check out this weird ass gun, handed it back and said "alright shittin' time." That is proper procedure, any less can 100% get you fired from here and we literally had a meeting where we told everyone this about 6mo ago, anyone who doesn't know how to use them has two options,

A) Don't.

B) Get with the FFL manager for a lesson and he'll test you on it after.

The Marine did, however, know that no live ammo was being brought onto the boat, and that he’d personally checked that the weapon was unloaded before handing it to me - just so I could see how much it weighed.

Yes yes and the Bubba in my shop with a loaded rifle last week said the same thing, but we racked the charging handle because we always check, popped a live round out, gave him a tsk tsk, and handed him back his round. No live ammo allowed when bringing shit in to get work done.

Was that tiny incident irresponsible on MY part?

A little, yeah. I don't know shit about chainsaws but I know enough to know I shouldn't be fucking with them. If I'm gonna touch one I'm damn sure asking someone who does know "how do I use this thing safely" first, even if it's a demo with the chain removed.

The marine definitely bears more responsibility, but also to his slight credit there was supposed to be no live ammo "on set" (the boat) as opposed to Producer Alec Baldwin's set where they were plinking at cans on set in between takes which requires live ammo on set, yet still he should have insisted, or used a chamber flag that indicates an unloaded firearm and takes up the space of the chamber (many guns ship this way, I can check our Baretta 92s if you want to see if they do, but we also sell a 5 pack for $3), and you should always insist yourself so that you don't accidentally shoot someone while holding a gun even if whoever handed it to you said "it's totally empty bro trust me," never trust those people, they're the gun equivalent of "don't worry, you don't need a condom," you doubly so do whenever someone says that.