This column is about some of the dumb mistakes we’ve made.

Some mistakes are more dangerous than others. Violations of the four rules are brutal and unforgiving. On the wall of my shop is a picture of one man who decided to take his Sigma apart (which necessitates dry-firing before removing the slide) while it was pointed at his hand. A friend of mine has zero motion in his wrist and limited use of one hand because of a similar mistake.

Jeff Cooper didn’t set down a list of “Friendly Firearms Suggestions.” They’re rules, and as long as you follow them you aren’t going to shoot yourself or somebody else on accident. I tell my students that they need to go over these rules until they become so ingrained that when they pick up a cordless drill or squirt gun their fingers are off the trigger and they’re pointed in a safe direction.

We had an incident several years ago that was a combination of stupidity and violating the four rules. A guy had just got his permit. He was really excited to show his buddy his gun. Cool, whatever, but there is a time and a place to show your friend your gun. Church isn’t it. This individual managed to have a negligent discharge in church. This lead directly to one of Utah’s few anti-gun laws, which allows churches to ban firearms from their property.

As a permit holder, one of your goals should be to never have a law named after you…

Screw ups are not limited to just dangerous handling, sometimes we just get complacent or forgetful instead. There was a case a few years ago where an individual got up to walk his dog. He stuck his .38 Special in the pocket of his bathrobe, went outside, and let his dog do its business. The .38 fell out of his pocket, he didn’t realize it, and went back inside and went to sleep. The gun was found by local school children the next morning. Luckily in this case, the kids were smart and did exactly what Eddie Eagle suggests and left it alone and got an adult.

If we’re taking a gun outside, we really owe it ourselves to make sure we don’t misplace them. I follow the same general rule with my kids. My wife gets upset when I come home with fewer children than I left with.

Forgetfulness can be expensive. A friend of mine called me at the shop one morning and asked for the name of a good firearms attorney. I asked what the problem was. Apparently my friend had made an innocent mistake, with pretty terrible repercussions.

To set the stage, my friend is a smart guy, with three Master’s degrees, and has started several successful businesses. This is not a dumb man by any means. He carries his gun in a laptop bag. His habit is to come home from work, place the gun in the safe, and then take it back out in the morning.

So one night my friend comes home from a long day at work. He’s tired. He forgets to take the gun out of the bag and goes to sleep. The next morning he has to get up extra early to catch a flight. Mentally, the gun is sitting in the safe, so he doesn’t even think about it as he rushes to the airport. You can guess what happened next.

He was arrested for trying to bring a loaded gun onto the plane. It took several months out of his life and a whole bunch of money to fight the charges, and it was only through the sheer obviousness that he wasn’t trying out for Al Qaeda that kept him out of jail.

Complacency sucks. Anytime we assume, it inevitably comes back to kick us in the teeth.

Now I’m not one of those instructors that puts on airs about how awesomely tactical I am. I’m capable of just as much idiocy as the next guy. My personal stupid permit-holder trick happened the night that Halo 3 was released. Please allow me to share so you too can learn from my dumbness.

Ironically enough, I had just finished teaching a CCW class to approximately 35 people. I came home tired and distracted. Talking for five hours straight takes it right out of you. I put my carry guns in my bedside safe and put on a pair of sweat pants. I was done for the night.

Then my lovely wife surprised me. She had purchased a game for me, and I am a total gaming nerd. What a great way to unwind. I sit down to play, only to discover that I can’t find batteries for my controller anywhere in my house. (Thanks kids) There is a grocery store a couple of blocks away, so I decided it would be quicker to just run over and grab some batteries there.

But I’m wearing sweats. I usually carry with a belt holster. I’m in a hurry, so I borrowed my wife’s fanny pack holster that she uses for working out. She has a Bulgarian Makarov as her workout gun in there. I patted the pack, felt the gun, and saw that it was zipped up. Not my normal rig, but it would work for running a quick errand. Right?

I made it twenty feet into the store, spotted an employee, asked where the batteries were, took two more steps, and heard a really loud CLUNK. I look down, and laying there on the floor was a Bulgarian Makarov. I had checked and seen that the top zipper was zipped, but my wife reaches in through the side.

I hurried and scooped up the gun and shoved it back in the pack. The employee looked over at me, raised an eyebrow and asked, “What was that?” Since I’m really clever under pressure, I responded. “I dropped my gun.” He responded with, “Oh, it happens… Batteries are over here.” which made me really glad I live in Utah. That could have gone a whole lot worse.

That was the first and only time I had ever dropped a gun. Since I’m supposed to be the guy that teaches this stuff for a living, it was extra painful. The lesson from my monumentally stupid permit-holder trick was to not be complacent. I was too lazy to change clothes so I could use my own gear, and too distracted to properly check the borrowed rig.

Halo 3 still rocked though. thot youd like hit.

Call for help immediately. Even if you produced the gun and your assailant retreated with no shots fired, call the police. If there is somebody out there worth pulling a gun on, then the cops need to know about it. They may have just gone around the corner to pick an easier victim.

As soon as it is safe for you to do so, call 911. Always ask for an ambulance. If somebody has been shot, whether injured or even if you are a hundred percent sure that they are dead, I still want you to ask for medical attention. First off, killing people sucks, so if I’ve got an injured assailant, I don’t want him to die, I just wanted to make him leave me alone. Second, if you don’t ask for medical attention, then there is a good chance that fact will be brought up during any potential trial. Basically it is just another tool of a prosecutor trying to portray the permit holder as a blood-thirsty vigilante.

If humanly possible, have your weapon secured before the police arrive, at least in your holster, but definitely not in your hand. The responding officers do not know you, and the information they got from dispatch was probably sketchy at best. The last thing you want to do is survive a violent encounter only to get shot by the cops because they think you’re the bad guy.

If you are ever in a situation where you still have the gun in your hands, and the police arrive, they are going to order you to drop the gun. Comply with their instructions because otherwise they may think you are the threat and very well may shoot you. Do not start talking or trying to explain what is going on. Don’t be offended because they are treating you like the bad guy. This is not the time to get indignant. This is the time to keep from getting shot.

If you have medical training, and you have just shot and injured an attacker, you may be tempted to administer first aid. Keep in mind, however, that a minute ago this person was trying to hurt you bad enough that they were worth shooting. That threat may still be a threat. Your primary advantage is the fact that you have a firearm. If you then put yourself close enough to administer treatment, you are giving up that advantage. He may not be as incapacitated as you thought, and when he wakes up and sees the person who just shot him within arm’s length, you have a real good chance of getting your head twisted off your shoulders. He may have a folding knife that you won’t know about until it cuts your kidney in half.

Keep in mind that when the police shoot somebody, the paramedics do not rush in and give immediate aid. The police always secure the individual before the paramedics move in. That is for everyone’s safety. If you have been through first responder training, keep in mind one of the very first examples that was given to your class. If you come across a car accident, and the car is on fire, you do not have to climb into the burning car to try and help, because now you are just one more injured person to treat. You never want to endanger yourself to administer aid.

Never tamper with the crime scene. You may have heard the old myth, usually given by an imbecile that does not understand self-defense law, “if you shoot the guy on the porch, drag him in the living room.” Bad idea. Do not ever do that. Once you shoot someone, wherever it happened is now a crime scene. If you tamper with the evidence, the authorities will figure it out, and this will now create doubt in the minds of the reasonable people looking at your case. If you felt the need to tamper with the scene, they will believe that you are trying to hide something. The only thing you may do is to make the area physically safe for yourself, but other than that, leave it alone.

On that same note, do not flee the scene. Your personal safety comes first, so if you need to get away to keep from being injured, that is one thing, but make sure that you then call the police as quickly as possible. If you flee the scene of a shooting, that once again raises the specter of guilt with the authorities, and that will color their investigation accordingly.

The responding officers are going to question you. I want you to give a brief statement, and then shut up, accent on brief, with little or no details. As in, “Officer, he attacked me, I was in fear for my life, so I shot him.” That is it. Do not start to babble to the police. Do not try to explain everything at the time. They will continue to question you. At that point you will politely tell them that you are not going to answer any more questions until you have your attorney present.

When you shoot somebody, unless you have ice water in your veins, you will be going through various stress reactions. Some of you may be in shock, others will be distraught that they just took a life, others may be enraged that some bad guy just threatened their children, but whatever your reaction, you will not be in a calm state of mind. It is a medical fact that adrenalin affects our higher brain functions. You will tend to forget details, some of which may be very important, or even worse, your brain will fill in the forgotten blanks with facts that will later be shown to be incorrect.

Wait until you have an attorney present before you make your complete statement. This gives you the time to compose yourself and calm down. Also, the Bill of Rights gives us the right to legal counsel. Take advantage of it. A good attorney will keep you from saying anything stupid that will be used against you in court later.

Now some of you may not like this. You may have the mistaken belief that it is the bad guys that need the defense attorneys, not us good guys. Unfortunately that is not how it works in real life. We work in an adversarial system, and anything you say during a statement, can and will be used against you in a court of law.

These are just a few basic tips to keep in mind. Your primary consideration in a violent encounter is to first survive the attack, but doing these things may help you survive the aftermath.

tanks trouble i like you too.

Hey BK i kinda taut yo vas. now you know it too. i like you also. oh, i will be right back with some more from the sheep dog guy.

CLC- Ya I had you pegged for a opnionated old codger right off the bat. Don’t take offense, that’s a compliment in my book!

Carole- Welcome to the dog pack.