NRA Women know the rules of gun safety:
- All guns are always loaded
- Never let the muzzle cover anything you’re not willing to destroy
- Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target
- Know your target and what’s beyond it
But having a fun, safe day at the range goes beyond those fundamentals. Shooting is a very safe activity precisely because we take these things very seriously. When you’re at a range, whether it’s outdoors or indoors, and particularly when there are other people around, you need to know the rules that sometimes go unspoken but which are in place to keep everyone safe.
1. Follow All Range Rules and Commands
If there’s a range officer present, his or her word is law, period. You’re expected to obey any commands they might give. If the range is unattended, follow any rules they have posted.
2. Ask for Help If You Need It
If you’re new to guns or just struggling with something mechanical about your firearm, don’t hesitate to ask for help. Range officers and your fellow shooters, even if they’re strangers to you, are generally happy to help.
3. Mind Your Guns and Ammo
If you’ve brought multiple guns to the range, be sure to only keep one gun out on the table at a time—the rest should be stored away in a case, on a rack behind you, or somewhere else.
In addition, never have more than one kind of ammo on the table at a time. The reason for these two rules is that it’s too easy to accidentally grab the wrong kind, especially when boxes are open and ammo is sitting around loose.
I have been to way too many range events where there are guns sitting everywhere and boxes of ammo that start out in one place but get carried around and mixed up until the gun and ammo are separated, and the table is cluttered with a mishmash of stuff. This is a mess. Loading a gun with a cartridge it’s not designed to shoot is a disastrous safety hazard, so avoid this mistake by only having one gun and one caliber of ammo out at a time.
4. Be Careful Picking Up Ammo
One range where I shoot forbids picking up dropped ammo until your shooting session is done. Regardless of where you shoot, if you must pick ammo up off the ground, check every single cartridge you pick up to confirm what it is. Not long ago, while taking a hunter prep course, a classmate picked up a cartridge that had hit the floor in the ladies room. She was about to slip it into her ammo holder on her belt before it occurred to her to check it—sure enough, she’d picked up one of the .243s that had fallen out of my holder, thinking she’d been the one who dropped it. Fortunately, she noticed before she slipped it into her 6.5 Creedmoor.
5. Never Break the 180
“Breaking the 180” is a rule in many shooting competitions, and it refers to the 180-degree shooting line—basically the line on which you are standing when you fire, parallel to the targets. Breaking the 180 by pointing the muzzle anywhere behind this line, which means it could be pointed at your fellow shooters or spectators, is grounds for disqualification from a competition. Always mind the line and pay attention to where you’re pointing the gun, particularly if you’re moving or swinging it to engage multiple targets.
6. Respect Hot and Cold Calls
Anyone on any range can call “CEASE FIRE” when there’s a safety concern, and everyone present should observe the cease fire until it’s sorted out. Similarly, anyone can ask for a cold range, which means no one is allowed to be shooting, when they need to go downrange to change targets. Typically, they will ask first so everyone can finish what they’re doing for a couple of minutes before going cold. “Range is hot” is called when everyone is ready to shoot again.
Different ranges have different rules about this, but I recommend you unload your gun, show clear by leaving the action open (use a chamber flag to be ultra-considerate) and don’t touch the gun in any way when the range is cold. People are downrange, and just not handling the gun at all is a way to ensure that nothing will go wrong.
You can load magazines while people are downrange, but don’t put them in the gun. If you want to tinker with your gun while the range is cold, see if there’s a place you can take it aside, off the line with a safe backstop, to work on it. If there’s not, wait until the range goes hot again.
7. Never Go Downrange Until It’s Been Called Cold
This goes along with the previous point, but it’s important enough that it gets its own section. I’ve witnessed a violation of this when my husband and I took another couple, new to guns, to a remote outdoor range to help them learn how to shoot their new handguns. We were to the far right of the range, which was really just one big open space, shooting pistols at 10 yards. On the far left of the range was a father and son shooting rifles at 100 yards.
Everything was fine, until we had a little lull in our shooting to reload and our friend just walked right out onto the range to go grab his target. Shocked, my husband and I shouted at him pretty harshly to get back, because the range was still hot. His wife was about to shoot only a few yards away! He learned an important lesson that day: Never, ever go downrange until the range has been called cold. And even then, look around you and make sure everyone on the line heard the command and is complying—just like you still look both ways when the light turns green to make sure the cars coming the other way are obeying their red light.
Incidentally, the father and son were exhibiting some unsafe behavior that day, and the young son was clearly the type who didn’t pay any attention to his father’s directions. We ended up cutting our shooting session a little short and leaving early because we didn’t feel totally comfortable. That’s another smart range safety lesson: Safety is everyone’s business, and if you don’t feel safe and you’re not in a position to ask, encourage or help someone who is not handling firearms safely, don’t be afraid to just pack up and leave.
