Always Learn Something New
One thing I try to reinforce to my children is that every time we go hiking or on an adventure, we should go away learning something new or at the very least have something we already know reinforced. Usually our learning comes in the form of something bad that happened to us and we now know what we could do better next time so it won’t happen again. Sometimes we forgot to bring this or that, or we put our hand too close to the Leatherman Charge saw blade while cutting a stick and have to reinforce knife safety and first aid stills. The concept of learning should never stop, even as adults.
We can learn from our own mistakes, or from those of others, which is sometimes easier for us to analyze. Take for instance all the firearm accidents in the news lately. Firearm rules always come to mind when I hear such news and after understanding what happened to get person X shot, two of the rules immediately comes to mind: All Guns Are ALWAYS Loaded and NEVER Point The Gun At Anything You Don’t Want To Destroy! The second one of those lessons is the toughest for people to grasp. Whether the gun is loaded or not; or if it is locked back and disabled… The point is, if it was always pointed in a safe direction, then any accidental discharge wouldn’t hurt anyone! Lets just rephrase that once more… IF A GUN IS POINTED IN A SAFE DIRECTION, IT CAN NEVER HURT ANYONE!
One other thing to note: 99% of the time when someone claims an accidental discharge, what they really mean is it was a negligent discharge and they were just plain stupid with their firearm and don’t want anyone to know.
