Baisc Gun Safety for Target Shooting: Practice Tips for the Gun Range

Series Summary

Target shooting is a very popular sport that can be safely enjoyed by people of many different ages and skill levels. Learning to shoot with a rifle or handgun is not complicated, but there are many important safety features to consider. This video will explain the equipment you’ll need, and give you some safety tips on how to carefully handle guns when you are practicing target shooting. This set of videos covers pump action rifles, different types of ammunition, handguns, pistols, gun safety, and shooting demonstrations.

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Chad. We’re going to talk a little bit today about target shooting, both handguns and rifles. Target shooting is a very popular sport in the United States and in other countries, it’s a whole lot of fun and there are a myriad of guns and a lot of equipment to go along with the sport. Each one kind of has its own purpose, so we’re just going to go through and talk a little bit about the different purposes and the different guns that you’d use to do that. Before you start handling any firearms, the first thing you want to know about are the rules. Guns are actually very safe, accidents are actually minuscule - and if you follow the rules, they’re pretty much impossible. The rules are basically that you always keep a gun unloaded until you’re ready to use it, you always keep it pointed in a safe direction, and you keep your finger out of the trigger guard and off the trigger until you’re ready to fire and have the gun pointed where you want. So, for example, with this rifle, you’d always keep it open, have a look, check, make sure it’s all empty. And you would keep your hand outside this trigger guard here-this is called the trigger guard with the trigger inside- and keep the gun pointed in a direction that’s safe. That way your gun can’t go off and its not going to hit anything that’s dangerous. Guns have been around for hundreds of years - 1500s or so, 1400s. They used guns called archebuses, which were absolutely massive, weighed 50 hundred pounds, and they’ve come through a lot of changes over the centuries. Mainly, at this point, they’ve kind of gotten to the point to where there aren’t very many changes anymore. The greatest changes probably ended in the early 1900s so these rifles have remained essentially the same since the 1900s. Even this so-called modern semi-automatic. Semi-automatics have been around since the early 1900s, maybe even late 1800s. So really, there’s not a whole lot new here, just minor changes. Guns have different uses, obviously. This one up front is mainly a target, hunting rifle. This is very much just a hunting rifle, as is this rifle. This is a World War II rifle, used for various things. And this is target and various uses- defense and such. Handguns are the same way. There’s very many uses, from self defense to just target shooting to hunting. And there’s a lot of differences between the guns and the ammunition they use, and we’re going to go through that and talk about how they differ in their various uses. "