Safety First: Mistakes Were Made, Lessons Were Learned

My first three years on a tactical team were spent on a regional team.  It was made of up of eight or nine towns in the southern part of the state.  Each department issued firearms to their officers so there was a fair variety of guns on the team.  I had been issued an HK MP5 with a handful of 30-round magazines.  (Yes, please!)  That was a sweet gun with a selector switch for semi-auto, two round burst, and, cue the trumpets, full auto.

I went through a week long sub-machine gun certification course, made it through SWAT school, and qualified under a challenging LAPD SWAT firearm standards for a fully automatic weapon.

Our team trained twice a month and we even had a few live operations.  During that time I had developed a bad habit.  I just didn’t know it yet.

Not That Kind of Safety

After changing departments and working in a larger city, I joined that city’s SWAT team and was issued an M4.  I went to a rifle instructor school at a well known and well respected firearms manufacturer and training site.  During that school I learned what I had been doing wrong for years and never knew it.  After all that training, all those certifications and qualifications, no one had ever told me — safety first.

Not safety as in don’t play with matches, don’t swim within an hour of eating, don’t blow dry your hair in the bathtub, etc.  No, not that kind of safety.  Safety, as in the safety on my gun.  No one had ever told me to keep my sub-gun or my rifle on safe when entering a house, before changing firing positions, before performing a magazine change, or before moving.  And I hadn’t been smart enough to figure that out on my own.

Weak Thumbs and Bad Ideas

It all started with that MP5 and my wimpy right thumb. The selector switch on that MP5 was nice and large, but super stiff.  I couldn’t flip it with ease like a light switch.  I actually had to use my index finger and thumb together to get it to move.  Now, I know what you may be thinking; never trust a man with weak thumbs. 

Well, no one ever knew about my weak thumbs because I never said anything.  What I did do was game it.  I gamed it by running around with that selector switch set to two round burst, because, hey, one wasn’t enough and full auto might be too much.  The way I figured it, if I were to suddenly get in a gun fight, there was no way I was flipping it from safe to fire in any reasonable amount of time.  So, like a moron, I thought it would be safer to have that baby ready to go.

It’s true.  I ran around like a little Johnny Tactical with an MP5 slung around my neck set to fire a two round burst.  With all my gear, all the moving around, it’s a wonder I never had a negligent discharge.

Gaming It

As cops, that’s what we tend to do, right?  Game it.  I mean, if we’re not cheating we’re not trying. I think Confucius said that.

I gamed training.  I would stage my magazines in my pouches so I could get them out faster.  I would do administrative magazine changes so I would never go to lock-back during a drill.  I didn’t practice switching from safe to fire and back again because it felt slower.  I wasted countless opportunities to fail on the range.  I did all that for years until an outstanding firearms instructor saw my deficiency, called it out, and taught me otherwise.

The Lesson

Please, don’t be stupid like me.  Keep your rifle on safe until you’re on target and ready to fire.  Put your rifle on safe before you perform a magazine change.  Put your rifle on safe before moving from prone to kneeling, or from kneeling to standing.   Put your rifle on safe before moving from one position of cover to another.  It doesn’t take more than a nano-second.  And please, don’t game your training by staging your magazines or doing administrative reloads.  That may improve your drill times but it won’t help you in a gun fight.

Don’t be afraid to fail on the range. Don’t be embarrassed to fail in front of your teammates.  Train like you’re in a real world situation.  Because when it counts, we won’t rise to the level of our expectations, we will fall to the level of our training.

__________________________

• Do you game your training drills or qualification courses?
• Are you proficient at manipulating your safety?
• What is one bad habit you can start to change this week?