Thursday, April 30, 2009

Why You Should ALWAYS Wear Eye Protection When Shooting

Over on THR, Dave McC. posted pictures of a side by side shotgun which suffered a catastrophic failure.  Luckily, the shooter suffered no permanent injuries.  He was wearing eye protection.

Thankfully, I've never suffered a similar event.  I have had empty cases, backsplash from indoor and outdoor backstops, and gas shot into my face, however.  Shooting right handed guns from the left shoulder, I regularly find my glasses with oil droplets on them, AAMOF.

You only get one set of eyes.  Protect them.

3 comments:

Tony said...

Well said!

I'd just like to add that eye glasses are not the same thing as proper eye protection. Ignoring impact resistance, they are usually quite open in most directions for hot brass, backsplatter etc. to find its way to the eyes. (I hear having a hot casing fall behind your glasses so it gets stuck between the eye glasses and the eye is unpleasant...)

For some reason a lot of eye glasses wearer think they have "built in" eye protection, but it seems they never take their glasses off and compare their coverage with that of a proper set of eye protection glasses. This has always puzzled me because to me the difference seems so obvious. Maybe most people just haven't ever had the pleasure of someone drilling into their eyeball to remove a stuck splinter? (Although actually, the drilling bit was just... wobbly. Once the local anesthetic kicked in, it didn't hurt at all. Before that anesthetic though, my day sucked fairly much.)

Dave Markowitz said...

Something I forgot to mention as part of eye protection is a hat with a brim. And don't wear it like you're cruisin' down in da hood. A hat's brim will keep empty cases from falling down between your face and your glasses. This is especially important when shooting near someone else who is firing a semiauto, and doubly so on an indoor range.

Tony said...

Right, that'll stop hot brass from falling between the glasses and your eye. Now you just need to never be turned sideways to the berm when someone else is shooting to prevent blacksplatter finding its way past the glasses...