Talk:Safety area (shooting)

Contestion of deletion proposal

Hello @Hemmers:, I contest the deletion of safety area. It is a very important concept in many types of competition shooting as well as general safety of firearms. I will see if I can extend the article so it passes. Sauer202 (talk) 15:12, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Hello again @Hemmers:, I have now added some more sources to demonstrate that this is a fundamental important concept in practical shooting sports. While I would argue that it is not a niche, whether something is niche or not is not a requirement for inclusion on Wikipedia as far as I know. We have the possibility to use disambiguation pages if an article name should be used for several topics. Neither do I see how this can infringe NOTGUIDE, since it simply states what operations are commonly performed as well as strictly illegal with this form of safety precaution. Sauer202 (talk) 15:35, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Sauer202 Thankyou for your efforts to improve the sourcing. A few notes:

• Being important does not make something notable. This usgae of "safety area" is verifiable but there's no independent sigcov. There are many very important safety considerations in landing a plane, operating a port or conducting a motorsport race. We don't dedicate a wikipedia article to each of them. This article - being barely a couple of paragraphs - would (at most) be better suited as a section in the Gun safety article (which is itself a NOTGUIDE disaster zone and needs massive cleanup). However, I don't think a simple merge & redirect is appropriate because the title "Safety area" is extremely broad and I don't see that practical shooting is necessarily the primary topic (i.e. no more notable than safety or refuge areas in industrial settings, safety/danger zones in other shooting sports, etc) or that the title should redirect to gun safety.
• This is on the fringes of WP:NOTGUIDE as it's not addressing the reader directly, but it's still picking bits out of a rule book which are best left in safety briefings, even though it's written in decent encyclopaedic style.
• The concept of a safety area as descibed in the article is definitely niche - it is specific to practical shooting disciplines, which are popular but by no means dominant within the world of shooting sports. The concept doesn't really apply to other shooting disciplines. By way of example, at least two of the new citations use the concept "safety area" in a very different way.
  • The Windrock page states "At the command “Cease Fire!” immediately make your firearm “safe,” set the gun down pointed downrange, and step away from the firing line into the safety area with nothing in your hands." This runs completely counter to the safety area being the only place off-range you can handle firearms. The usage suggests that their safety area is somewhere behind the line that guns shouldn't be handled or unboxed.
  • The Australian page is discussing 500yd ranges and silhouette shooting. "because of the large amount of land required to contain both range and safety zone." In this context, safety zone means the area beyond the backstop where their ballistic template requires a sterile area for fallout of any stray shots that go over the backstop, or to capture ricochets off the steel targets. In the UK we would call it a Danger Area! It is not an area where people can handle/unbox their firearms off the range.

The issue with all these citations is that there's nothing independent or general in there. We have the IPSC rulebook. We have a bunch of ranges repeating the IPSC rule book, but these only describe what those ranges do, and are in some cases (as above) misleading, displaying distinctly different usages of the phrase. There's no general discussions or papers on safe range design at a conceptual level which show notability.

At the end of the day, this is a matter of training and range standing orders. When you come to a range, there are range-specific rules, most of which will be generic but some of which could vary (e.g. whether a red flag means "shooting in progress, do not enter" or whether it means "person down range, do not shoot"). We can't and shouldn't preempt that on wikipedia. Hemmers (talk) 09:33, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

I disagree, and hold that it is indeed notable. First, the fact that a word can have several meanings does not mean that only one of those meanings can have an article on Wikipedia; there can be several articles about those different meanings. I want to first establish: That is not a valid reason to delete an article! Going on, you make a lot of assumptions. You claim that you have visited many ranges in Europe, but never seen a safety area, which I find quite strange. However, I agree that the article can be expanded with more depth. It lacks the fact that introduction of the safety area has been one of the largest safety improvements of firearms safety in practical shooting competitions. Still, that is far away from warranting a deletion. Sauer202 (talk) 20:50, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

Claim? I hope you're not suggesting that I'm telling porkies!? WP:GF I find it quite strange that you're not more familiar with ranges without safety areas, given they are the majority (even in the US).

Safety areas as described in the article are extremely specific to dynamic shooting, which is quite popular in the US but less so internationally (as a market share of shooting sports overall, we have a thriving IPSC community in Europe, but much smaller than ISSF, FITASC, etc). No such concept exists in ISSF, FITASC, CISM or ICFRA/NRA shooting. Go to Century Range at Bisley and you will find no "safety area", nor on the Sporting Rifle ranges (running deer, which are the odd ones that use a red flag to mean "range cold, don't shoot" instead of "range live, do not enter" - see previous comments about importance of local range orders). Same at Eurostand Lorraine, Hannover or the GTSA range in Gibraltar. Bullseye, running target, silhouette... In these cases firearms are brought to the firing point, unboxed, used, reboxed and removed. Many of them don't even have a safety catch (never loaded except during shooting). Safety areas are the preserve of shooting sports where no firing point exists as such and you have to unbox/holster... somewhere. Most shooters won't ever use or be familiar with a safety area because it's simply not relevant to 90% of target shooting sports. The new title is an improvement, still seems excessive for a standalone article which could easily be folded into Gun safety. Hemmers (talk) 09:16, 21 June 2024 (UTC)