Yiiiiiiikes:
Almost took a page out of the Shoothouse Puzikas handbook at ~0:30.
How the hell does stuff like this happen? I can’t even believe the conditions some people apparently shoot under, which cause gross negligence like this. That’s just embarrassing for everyone involved.
Real handy at least that the guy was wearing a white shirt (friendly) LOL. I suppose we can laugh at it now because he made it out alive. Please guys, don’t let these kind of clown-school shenanigans happen where you shoot. I’ve been jokingly called a safety nazi in the past, but I don’t have any extra holes so the joke is on those guys.
Thoughts?
Gat tip: Joe, no uno
Comments
16 responses to “Moving Human Friendly Targets On A Competition Shooting Range”
I’m never wearing a tan shirt to a match ever again
down here in Australia most if not ranges make you wear bright/multie tone clothing so you stand out, shit like this doesn’t happen and injuries are super rare although some times unlicensed people come to ranges rent guns and commit suicide but that’s on them
How may IPSC or IDPA matches are there on any given weekend in AU? Here, there are half a dozen matches every weekend, all within an hour of me, and each one will draw 100 shooters.
cant speak for all of Australia however at my local the number would be almost the same since if you hold a pistol license you have to compete 10 times every year in each discipline you own pistols for. So if you own two pistols one being for 3gun and using another for IPSC you are required to do 10 of each so numbers are quite high since people who have grown out of it don’t want to lose there pistols.
I was at work and yelled ” holy fuck” out loud when I saw that. Lucky it’s ok to do that here.
I did the exact same thing,
I’m seeing another issue here, and that’s the explosive growth of “shoot on the move” disciplines. Years ago, matches were small. You’d have 6 squads of 5 guys per squad. Today, some matches have 6 squads of 20-24 per squad. Those number are both good and bad. It’s good because the shooting sports are growing. It’s bad because those matches take all day to shoot and the squads are unmanageable. To this point, few match directors have been willing to either raise match fees or cap the entries available. Both options will work to keep numbers squad size more manageable. The other option for IDPA and USPSA is to require organization membership and classification to be able to shoot the match. I’ve never been to an IDPA match where more than half the shooters were IDPA members.
I can only image we’re going to see some more safety issues like this as the number of competitors grows.
The club I shoot with in remote south central Iowa has doubled from last year alone, with newcomers every match. That’s great, but you’re right. Command/control degrades as squad sizes grow. There may be a need for a “clear range RO” in charge of clearing the course of fire before going hot. The other thing is that individuals need to pay attention to their surroundings and we need to watch out for our buddies (otherwise known as common sense).
That said, our club president has been around forever (former USPSA GM) and told us a story from the 80s that sounded a lot like what the video shows. It was either a section championship or nationals. Squad too big, one guy happily airgunning away, assumed the beep and bang bang were from the adjacent bay. It ended without injury, but only by pure luck.
I think for bigger matches you just need to control who goes downrange for scoring. The RO stays with the shooter. A 3-person (or however many) are allowed down after the RO and shooter return to the stage prep. The RO doesn’t leave the staging box with the new shooter until all 3 (or whatever set number) scorers/judges have returned to the stage box.
Or if anyone other than the RO and shooter go downrange on a course with barriers and blind spots they have to wear a flag that can be seen at all times.
Looks like Lake Havasu City, AZ to me
it is in AZ and that IS Bob Bales the “RO” from extremeshooters.com out of Havasu . As soon as I posted it in the youtube comments, it was deleted by supertactical. If you are going to post the video, why are you trying to hide who it is when his name is on the back of his shirt? Block it out or don’t post the video. Strange
Haha ya I saw that too and checked out the website. Weird they would delete the comment like you said.
I like how he crouched behind the cardboard target but didn’t hit the deck ;p
Personally I’d have probably been too busy filling my pants to think about anything else.
I wonder what the after action report showed the mistake to be, and what their correction was.
Quoting the post from London Bridge Action Shooters
As many of you know by now, we experienced a very serious safety incident at our last match. A shooter was allowed to make ready and begin shooting a stage, while a person was still downrange. Fortunately, the person was spotted, the shooter stopped, and the incident concluded with no one being hurt or worse. This was the first of any such safety incident in our club’s history of holding matches for over 12 years.
The primary fault naturally lies with a complacent RO, who did not make the extra effort to verify that the course of fire (with particularly poor visibility) was clear before starting the next shooter. Lesson: don’t pick up the clock unless you are prepared to perform the duties of the RO with the seriousness and thoroughness that the job requires. If you need help, ask for it.
The secondary fault lies with the person picking brass, who was completely unaware that the other stage resetters had long since exited the stage, and that he was completely alone on the stage. Lesson: brass pickers who repeatedly linger on the course of fire past the time required to reset the stage targets will be denied the right to pick brass until after the squad is completely finished shooting the stage. PAY ATTENTION to when you need to leave the stage along with the target resetters. This is a constant source of RO aggravation with brassers, and it will not be tolerated any longer.
And finally to a much lessor degree but worthy of discussion, ALL shooters must have their heads in the game, even if they’re not the shooter, RO or scorekeeper. This is live fire after all. We all should recognize that a stage has poor visibility or an RO is being less-than-diligent and do what we can to improve the situation – an extra set of eyes, a cautionary suggestion. There are not enough people who routinely shoulder this burden. Everyone needs to be involved.
… so, 381 characters devoted to Range Safety* Officer BOB BALES the fuckstick extrordinaire who almost got a man killed & 596 characters devoted to the guy who almost got killed.
I have shot with these guys many times and they are truly very safe and always professional. Moral of the story is if it could happen there it could happen anywhere. A dropping of the guard can be catastrophic in action pistol.