Talk:Gun safety

Treat firearms as if they are loaded

Currently, this section does not cite any sources. I have just added a link to a YouTube page in which Jeff Cooper lists his four rules of gun safety, and explains his working of rule_1. Does this qualify as a reference? JHowardGibson (talk) 17:07, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

Rewrite as an encyclopedia article not a how-to manual

The policy WP:NOTHOWTO is pretty clear, and the basic structure and sectioning of this article flies in the face of it. It's obvious from the first section, Rules and mindset, that the intent is to instruct the reader. Compare this article with automotive safety, food safety, pharmacovigilance, toy safety, aviation safety and so on. This article, gun safety, is nothing like a normal encyclopedia article. The automotive safety article, for example, provides an overview of the various factors that affect the risks around cars: the design, the driver, other drivers, the environment, regulation, enforcement. It would look silly if the article consisted almost entirely of "driver should do this, drivers should never do that, and also never do that or that". Automotive safety doesn't contain any kind of list of dos and don'ts for drivers at all, but merely classifies driver training and psychology as one of many safety topics, and describes various theories about it. Toy safety does not exhort the reader "always pick up your toys!" and "never light your toys on fire!". Because this is an encyclopedia.

This needs a complete reorganization, rewrite, and most of this excessive detail needs to be dumped. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 06:16, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

• Going once? So far nobody has objected to deleting all the how-to content. There's probably bits that are salvageable but I don't see any sign of that happening. And the salvageable bit are easily re-created and re-written without all the non-encyclopedic how-to advice. Anybody have a problem with just nuking most of these how-to sections and keeping a basic outline of gun safety practices? if not... 3... 2... 1... --Dennis Bratland (talk) 01:39, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

I just discovered this now. I have used Wikipedia's article on gun safety as a reference on gun safety. We need to distinguish between a set of rules, and a step by step procedure. I agree that Wikipedia has no business listing the steps needed to dismantle and clean a 1911 Colt .45. Jeff Cooper's rules on gun safety are not a procedure. They are in fact, most of your gun safety strategy. If someone searches Wikipedia on gun safety, they should see this. JHowardGibson (talk) 18:35, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

You don't mention any reason why we don't want gun maintenance instructions but we do want gun safety instructions. Why the exception?

WP:NOTHOWTO is clear that instructing the reader in the imperative mood is not OK. It also mentions that Wikibooks is right there. People can certainly have access to gun safety slogans and checklists. You can even link to them in the external links section.

Have you looked at automotive safety, food safety, pharmacovigilance, toy safety, aviation safety, etc? It's pretty clear we don't write articles like, well, this.

Should Wikipedia really be telling car drivers to put their hands at 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock on the steering wheel? If you dig around in articles on car safety you'll come across how the steering wheel hand position drivers were taught to use had to change with the introduction of air bags. Anti-lock braking system#Effectiveness gets into how driver skills had to change to adapt to antilock brakes, especially fleet drivers who alternated between ABS and non-ABS cars. That is encyclopedic content. Not just telling readers do this, don't do that. Instead thinking in depth about why this is taught, and that is not. What are the different points of view on gun safety? I don't think anyone has even tried to research that here. Do all experts agree on this topic? I doubt it.

Eddie Eagle doesn't recite the curriculum or feature a copy-paste of bullet points or checklists; rather it looks at how the program has functioned in society, and evaluations of whether it helps, or even causes harm. Same with Drug Abuse Resistance Education. Look at the tens of thousands of Category:Cuisine articles, and not a complete recipe in any. Or very few; there's policy violations here and there but someone will get to them.

It's totally fine to mention some of the content of gun safety eduction. But it needs to be for the purpose of showing readers "what is gun safety?" not "how to be safe with your gun". Mentioning some of Jeff Cooper's rules is fine so we can see what they are like, and compare them to other approaches. But we wouldn't have a complete list, for the same reason we don't have Plot-only description of fictional works or complete walkthroughs of video games, as explained at the WP:PLOT policy.

I'd also suggest reviewing the arguments at WP:USEFUL. Wikipedia:No disclaimers also expands on the broad consensus that we will stay focused on making a good encyclopedia, not trying to solve other problems.

Keep in mind that if you put a lot of effort into putting how-to lists of gun safety rules into an article, eventually any editor with basic reading comprehension is going to see that it violates policy, and they're going to come and delete it. You could put it back again but then someone else will delete it. The policy doesn't really leave wiggle room. Do the same over at Wikibooks and your contribution will last and be used by many readers. Or research the topics I mentioned above, and you'll make a much better encyclopedia article and your contributions will stick around, in some form at least. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 20:26, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

You don't mention any reason why we don't want gun maintenance instructions but we do want gun safety instructions. Why the exception?

I am making a distinction between procedures and rules. If you read articles and watch videos on YouTube, almost everybody emphasises that mindset is more important than the technology. The history of gun safety and the alternate rules were interesting too. A gun is a deadly weapon and therefore it is more dangerous than aircraft, cars, food, pharmaceuticals, and toys. The first thing you need to know about gun safety is the rules for handling firearms. Read the page on Kelly Johnson. It contains his 14 Rules of Management, and it ought to. It describes how the man worked. JHowardGibson (talk) 17:52, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia has policies and guidelines. And local consensus and essays. There's very firm rules and many levels of weaker rules. So yes, that's a thing. And the policy Ignore all rules exists. So there you go: break any rule you want. In theory you could get away with literally anything, because IAR. In practice, that kind of thing falls flat on its face 99.9999% of the time. Not always, but you have got to have a very, very special circumstances. You have to get a lot of people to want to go along with it.

Whether guns are more dangerous than cars or pharmaceuticals is widely debated. Most of the bellowing ex-Marine drill sergeants who bellow gun safety rules in all caps are the same ones who argue swimming pools are more dangerous than guns. It depends how you define "dangerous". That whole can of worms is called gun politics. Yikes.

I think the first thing you'd have to do to make a case that WP:IAR applies to gun safety but not food safety or toy safety is to prove with overwhelming evidence that gun safety slogans, checklists, mnemonic and so forth actually work. From what I can tell, that is highly debated and not a settled question; see Eddie Eagle again, or D.A.R.E.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think you're climbing a very steep mountain and there's a vast amount of history that has gotten us here. Wikipedia:Medical disclaimer says in big all caps "WIKIPEDIA DOES NOT GIVE MEDICAL ADVICE". Maybe guns are different but it's hard to see. Do we have to make sure we tell everyone the safe way to shoot heroin? Is it the probability of death when doing the thing or the total number of people hurt by the thing? When did any of this become the responsibility of encyclopedias? Before Wikipedia existed, would anyone have expected to ever find a complete list of gun safety warnings in Encyclopedia Brittanica or World Book? Maybe, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't.

The amount of work you're talking about is far less than just expanding the article in the usual encyclopedia way as I described. By giving readers a broad, solid survey of the topic of gun safety, what the issues are, the history, the methodology, etc, they're going to have the tools and motivation they need to go learn what they need to learn, if they want to get a gun.

Kelly Johnson is a dab page but I think you mean Kelly Johnson (engineer). I would say that article violates policy, which as I mentioned, you can find examples of that. I don't want to go chasing down every example, but I would bet that before such an article is promoted to WP:Good article or WP:Featured article, the copy-paste of all 14 rules will be pared down and summarized. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 20:00, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

What happened to discipline details?

There was information on gun discipline, like information on correct handling of guns. Examples being trigger discipline, and the two other disciplines, so what happened to it? it's missing! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2a00:23c4:489c:6101:ca5:18fa:1c66:d45f (talk • contribs) 10:51, July 11, 2021 (UTC)

Scroll up. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 20:28, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Four rules

It seems like a frankly bizarre decision to explicitly mention the four rules, and allude to them multiple times, but not actually list them. Trilobright (talk) 16:20, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Trilobright: They have been removed following a discussion. I also think it would be beneficial to quote them (as previously) or summarize. I understand they are used in education. I reckon most citations have been kept, but they’re for verification, not to read about them in the first place. ‑‑ K (🗪 | ✍) 17:48, 8 February 2022 (UTC)