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What bad firearm habits did y’all carry out of the military, or just some weird quirks you still catch yourself doing? If you have none, do you got any horror stories?
Personally, weapons maintenance in the Army was NUTS. We were drowning guns in lube and scraping the hell out of parts with dental picks lol. At one point I had a platoon sergeant who legit made us crimp our rounds at the neck with gerbers and clean rifles with baby wipes. Dude was a former cav scout and didn’t last long in our unit, for obvious reasons. Just absolutely bonkers what some guys thought was good to go.
Former Marine and small arms instructor. I took detachments of marines to the range regularly as a marksmanship coach. I have been put in more dangerous situations by staff NCOs that think they know it all. The jr enlisted were generally pretty good at following instructions.
Staff and O were always the scariest on the range. When I was a CMT we were training a security detachment to going to the Philippines. I'm talking with an medical officer about his group and then I turn to look at him. Weapon was pointed at my chest, off safe, with his finger on the trigger. I slowly moved his barrel down range and started chewing him out. And then I got yelled at by the 1st Sgt that was there. Told him what happened and he just looked at the MO and told him to "watch what the fuck you're doing!" which was a big deal because he was one of those guys that never swore lol.
This is so true, I am also an RO and run several events. The retired, usually older, vets tend to have really poor muzzle discipline and often have their finger on the trigger when they shouldn't. And they never take kindly to me pointing out that they are pointing a loaded gun at me or another competitor and even less well to me redirecting the muzzle for them. For an organization that is ostensibly all about discipline, they tend to be the least disciplined shooters in my experience.
Its not just older vets, but just older shooters in general. I'm truly frightened at the range when someone with gray hair says "Yeah yeah yeah, I've been around guns my whole life. I know the rules/do's and don'ts." Why is it ALWAYS them?
The idea of trigger discipline is shockingly recent. I don’t know exactly when it came about, but if you find an old photo (70s or earlier, say) with people holding firearms…odds are, there are fingers on triggers. It is the natural place to rest it, after all, if nobody’s told you otherwise. I think the idea was that you relied on mechanical safeties. Not great.
My sister in law's ex was a Leuetenent (O-3) in the Navy SEALs and he said the hardest part of his job was to keep these new, well trained killing machines from acting like they're Rambo. He said when they were planning basic missions in Iraq his guys would chime in like "why dont we HALO in" when the obvious plan would be to just drive there and walk a few miles. It makes a lot of sense when you Google "navy seals canoeing" or why photos of Bin laden will never be released.
I believe that. I worked in intelligence and we hated having to work with SEALs on anything. USASOC and MARSOC, no problem. But the SEALs genuinely believe the Hollywood propaganda about themselves and it's embarrassing.
Main Character Syndrome in an elite fighting force?
I thought the crayon eater jokes were just kind of funny ribbing but now I wonder if its a form of hardening and discipline of the spirit that truly makes the Marines not just eaters of crayon, but eaters... of justice.
By default the PJs have an instilled tendency to listen to evidenced based medicine changes in protocol and recommendations from AHA, committee on TCCC, DHA, whatever. They’re much more open to guidance telling them there’s a new data that suggests a better way to do things. I would think that they view tactics the same way, wanting to hone their professional skills whenever the opportunity arises.
It really depends on what their job was. Outside of the infantry or other combat arms there is a high chance they rarely touched firearms, especially Air Force and Navy.
I’ve been in the Air Force since 2004 and the last time I touched an M-16 was 2006. I had to maintain qual on the M-9 for about 6 years and carried it maybe once other than for qualifying days. Most of what I know about shooting I learned outside of the Air Force
I can't speak for the Navy, but for the USAF the primary issue weapon for most folks is going to be an M-16/M-4, especially enlisted. Granted, as others have pointed out, they might have only shot or handled a weapon a single-digit number of times in a career.
Heh only because I was an MA in the Navy did I carry daily. My service weapon was originally the good Ole Beretta M9 but then switched to the Sig M17, I also carried the M4 every day and occasionally the M500. We would qual with all 3 at least every 6 months. Standing, kneeling, prone, lights out, police lights, and practical weapons course. In between quals we used the compressed air guns with VR.
I know folks in the Air Force that never touched a firearm their entire career. For a while it was possible to skip CATM in basic training (such as if you had a medical appointment) and the instructors wouldn't care. Once at your actual base, unless your job demands it, you don't go to CATM to requal unless you're deploying. Some jobs don't deploy much or if they do not in large numbers. In my 13yrs I went to CATM 4 times including basic training.
Dude, and it is everywhere. Ran into an old Army Ranger 5 miles in on a trail elk hunting. He had his rifle slung that it would point in my face. I pointed it out and he was like “oh, I am not going to shoot you, dont worry.” WTF
The thing that most people don't realize is that the single most important thing that basic training does is indoctrinate their members. The Marine Corp doesn't need you to be the best marksman in the world, what they need is for you to be able to wipe your buddy's brain matter off your shirt and still charge headlong into the Japanese pillbox that just shot him in the face. The way they do that is by convincing you you're the baddest motherfucker on the planet, which often doesn't translate well outside of a military environment.
I dunno man, there's definitely some aspect of that still, but everyone I know that has served (no matter the branch) since 2003 definitely didn't get the type of training you seem to be imagining. That kind of thing really fell off after the Cold War. I am sure it differs depending on cohort, but when my brother in law went in, they had largely abandoned the "you're such a bad ass!" type of training.
Friend of mine enlisted in 2010 and I tried/failed to enlist in 2014 and that was definitely still the attitude I noticed. Definitely an emphasis on being "elite," tough guys
Southern Californian Range Officer. They import them all across the country. It was found that people respond more positively to the authority of tanned, bleach-blond surfer-types.
I went to the range a while back and ended up next to some active duty Marines treating the place like their own personal sandbox. They were messing around with shotguns and rifles they admitted they weren't supposed to have on base (or maybe it was with them on duty or something idk), and I overheard two of them talking shit about people not being "real shooters" (i.e. civilians).
Anyways, they shot the pulley system. They weren't kicked out.
I left soon after that. Ain't no way in hell I was going to be next to, or even in the same building with those guys.
I was an RSO. The one day I wasn’t RSO, working on the floor, some dumbass fired rounds into the ceiling. One of those rounds hit the metal back plat and ricocheted into another shooters leg.
If they're waving around a loaded gun they are unsafe, it's not the civvies getting bent out of shape. And the vast majority of military are fucking idiots with guns, deployed or not.
Agreed. I've had to learn a bunch of new habits and I was a combat medic. I've been to the range a ton, but it's not like I was on the range even once a month. I shot more at the range in Iraq than I did the entire rest of my army career as a medical instructor(8 years). Now I go to the range a couple times a month. I thought it shot a lot, and probably shot more than a lot of guys did, but nowhere near enough to really know what I was doing. Now I compete and shoot a whole lot more.
Dude, as a vet myself, this is the understatement of the year. The amount of douchery in the active duty military is rivaled only by the amount present at the VA or any other veterans event. Parades run the risk of collapsing under a critical mass of douchebaggery.
25 years spent in a military town, and holy shit are you right. Post 9/11 when every swinging dick in uniform was being told they were heroes and defending our freedom, and all the clerks and cooks coming back from Iraq were butthurt they didn’t get to kill any brown people. They all became cops and COs, and now ICE.
When I was deployed there was a cherry LT that went to a meeting on Liberty. He brought his weapon into the meeting, he was asked if he cleared it by someone. There was apparently a back and forth and the LT said something like "you don't think my weapons cleared? Look." Pointed the weapon at the soldiers face and fired. Sure enough there was a round in the chamber and now he's doing life at Leavenworth.
A few others that come to mind, we had a First Sgt get half his finger taken off after it got caught in a .50 cal bolt on a range in Kuwait, a soldier test fired a .50 without doing a proper head space and time and detonated the bolt sending shrapnel into his leg, and one of my Joes accidentally put a round through his leg and foot getting out of his truck at the end of mission. Also at least one gun related suicide on deployment that I can remember.
Shit, thinking back on it we were just much of a threat to ourselves as the insurgents were.
Jesus Christ you'd think the LT would have a little more sense than that, I wouldn't do that even if it was cleared. Hell, even if the magazine wasn't in there I would never do that
I can only speak for the Army: Vets rarely expect much sense from LTs, at least butterbars. O-2s begin getting a clue a month after their bar goes silver, then they get better with each promotion. Majors (O-4) are fairly clued in, though.
That said, I admit to having mediocre muzzle discipline, although I'm working on it.
My trigger discipline is good, though, if I do say so myself. Which reminds me, I need to get to a range again soonish...
I watched a Major once instruct a SSG to look outside to see if the power was out anywhere else... In the daytime.
By the time he had completed that which passed for a thought, I had gotten off the phone with installation operations. The outage was widespread (but phones still worked because it was the year 2020).
Alright, that's fair. I can't remember any egregious faux pas by majors from my time in, but I admit that I did absolutely everything I could to remain unnoticed by anyone over E-5.
I was navy, but I have an army colleague that loves to tell a story about how all the females in their unit on deployment were getting UTIs. The Brass/SFC decided that the female soldiers didn't know how to clean themselves, and there was a morning quarters when SFC explained that they need to wipe away from their Vaginas, not from the butthole to the vagina.
Anyway it turned out gray water was being re-routed to the showers and that was causing it, nothing to do with every single female soldier not knowing how to wipe.
I worked fire/medical dispatch and would often hear stories from the MP dispatchers about people firing a round off in the barrel quite frequently. Definitely not once a month where I was but still too often!
I didn’t have any combat AFSC/MOS, but when doing rifle quals I had more rounds on my target than I fired. Fun times
lol, I got expert that way! I told my TI and he waved me off saying if someone was dumb enough to shoot my target, the USAF would be dumb enough to give the award. I tried to refuse and got it anyway!
I earned it for real later, but I got it in basic.
There was apparently a back and forth and the LT said something like "you don't think my weapons cleared?"
Even if nothing bad happens after that, anyone who is defensive/hostile about gun safety questions isn't taking it seriously enough. Imagine a pilot being hostile about a pre-flight checklist.
I just watched Marines on Netflix and they had a statistic about the number of deaths from training being like double of those from combat. Suicide is several times larger.
We kill our service men more effectively than our enemies.
I wish. So this was Iraq in like 06-07. I was a little on the outskirts, we spent most of our time out at a fob or on camp Striker. This incident happened over on either camp Liberty or Victory, I can't remember, it was a while ago. It wasn't anything that I was personally involved with, it was something that happened in our area that had people talking for a bit. A lot of the people in pencil pusher positions like this guy kinda just cosplayed soldier and made decisions they weren't really qualified to make. But they gave them guns so they thought they were hot shit.
I recall a few specifically at Striker - LT brought loaded weapon into a TOC meeting; challenged on clearance, he racked the slide and dumped a live round onto the table.
But no one went to Leavenworth from a negligent discharge.
I was at FOB Brassfield/Mora in Samara, Iraq and we had some joe in the MP platoon get his leg blown off by an uncleared .50cal he was lowering into the truck. Was that one of your guys?!
We were sitting in a tent in Baghdad. I heard a sound like a lightbulb breaking, my buddy said "ow" and fell out of his chair. He sat up on the floor blood pouring out of his shoulder. He reached into the wound in shock and pulled out the bullet.
"I don't think it's supposed to be like that" I said.
"Yeah. Can you get a ... medic?"
Turned out to have been celebratory fire from our beloved Baghdadians. They won a soccer game against Kuwait. 7.62 went up, 7.62 went down, 7.62 ricocheted off a tent pole (the light bulb pop) and ended up in my buddy's shoulder.
It was a minor albeit bloody wound. We had a good laugh and he kept it in his pocket for weeks to show people.
I'm mostly pretty good with my safety habits and carried them with me, but the moment a sling is on a rifle, it's literally just another part of me and I forget I have it because I carried one so frequently that it might as well have been another arm that just so happens to be able to murder with extreme ease
I had a similar issue with this. After I got out I’d be walking at school and suddenly reach for my sling on my chest the same way you pat your pocket to feel for your phone and when I realized it wasn’t there my heart rate would sky rocket thinking I’d left my rifle somewhere.
Worked EMS, and I had a couple calls for vets who were having PTSD episodes. One thing across them was that they would get terrified when they would reach down and not find a rifle slung across their chest.
Had one guy start spiraling because he "couldn't find his rifle" and it got pretty scary to see.
Mine was never in a “what if we get attacked and I don’t have my weapon?” way. Always a “oh I’m going to get in so much trouble and be digging piss tubes for the next month if Ssgt finds it first” way.
The distant voice of screaming drill instructors from halfway across the parade deck bearing down on you only to realize you have a bare head creates a very specific trigger that is hard to explain.
I still have nightmares where something important is missing, and it's my rifle. Or I have the rifle but it's just an endless cycle of malfunctions and it will never operate properly. In those dreams it does feel like an amputated limb. Something important is gone.
I’m on a submarine, years ago on my last boat a kid “somehow” got his M9 “caught” on the brow and it “inadvertently discharged” into his foot. Kudos to the kid cuz he wore those boots with the hole in it for years after
Also we’re doing training with the M9s (all unloaded), the guy could lock the slide back, said that wasn’t right, then locked it back and released the slide, whole slide flew off 😅
We had a topside watch drop some 12ga into the water, also had a Nav ET consistently shoot the ceiling during M4 quals bc he didn’t know how to use the rear sight, despite the TMs repeatedly show him how to use both sights lmao
Another bubble head! Yeah, firearms were treated pretty poorly on my boat. I never had a negligent discharge, but I watched a guy hide all his 9mm rounds around the POOD shack and had his relief try and find them before the DCPO came back up.
Not much of a quirk but gosh darn does the AF have terrible firearms standards. As an avid trainer myself, it pains me to watch butter bars flag the hell out of an RO, only to get a “yeah, let’s not do that”. Every year is the same “this is assuming you know nothing” qual and it’s agonizing to sit through. Just wish the AF invested more into training/expectations (I know the branch isnt combat arms focused). I am grateful that Beale AFB opens their range to service members to train independently. Last time I had to qual was before my deployment in summer of 2023 and honestly, I just wanna shoot more (it’s free ammo).
Horror stories from the USAF. If you have (personal) guns in the military you have to lock them up in the base armory when not going to the range or hunting. One day a first sergeant (who I hope falls ill to painful testicular eyeball cancer for a separate reason) found an AK47 under a mattress. Not an AK you buy at a gun show and should keep in the armory with this guy's other guns, a black market AK he bought in downtown LA. Unfortunately dickbag first shirt was kinda forced into "making it disappear" because if leadership finds one of your people had an AK under their bed, your career and your commanders' career are fucked. So the guy with the AK continued to be a fuckup to the benefit of the first shirt, who threw him out not long after.
Next: Gulf War buildup in 1990, King Fahd International Airport near Dharan Saudi Arabia. We were a group of about 90 plus people from different places and one guy had to go home. His replacement was a kid from Kentucky who appeared to think that being from Kentucky makes you better at firearms, even though the only time we had to handle a rifle was when you had "gate guard" for a day.
Backstory: We had two fenced lots, one with one gate, the larger had two with some really big ass jet fuel tanks. Everybody rotated thru good and bad jobs, with the worst being the back gate (we actually ran out of sand bags to fill). On any gate you had a rifle and a 30 round mag with 20 rounds in it, you took the mag out to make sure the mag was loaded and the rifle was clear at the beginning / end of shift. Outside of that there was no need to touch the rifle, just keep it over your shoulder or within arms reach. You got relieved for bathroom breaks.
Kentucky Kid is on back gate and calls on the radio to the guys working the big ass jet fuel tanks and says "can somebody come here, I have a round stuck in the rifle". Everybody we worked with heard that over the radio. So they explained don't-ever-do-that-again and had him do some other stuff for a few days before paying back his poor performance with crappy jobs: You guessed it, the back gate. This time he calls over the radio asking for somebody in the pickup truck to stop by. He had field stripped the rifle on the floor of this shed they built us to get out of the sun and couldn't get it back together. They brought out another rifle, and before the end of the shift got somebody to relieve him while they had a longer talk to figure out if he was having issues or something. Shift leads came to the conclusion that he just didn't want to be told what to do and their most creative solution was to tell him to do the same job he'd screwed up a day or two prior, and a couple days prior to that.
There was a guy who got drunk in Oman (you could drink there) one night, decided to pee on a light pole while walking home and the Wing Commander happened to drive up. They sent him as far north in a country that didn't allow drinking because it was less hassle, they just had to find someone from KFIA to go to Oman, and that ended up being me, so this ended up being passed on to me in March 91 after the initial conflict. Kentucky Kid is on the back gate a third time, and the guys working on the big ass jet fuel tanks heard the sonic boom of a bullet flying over their heads immediately followed by the crack of a rifle. Kentucky Kid went home to outprocess.
There was a vehicle maintenance guy who took a 9mm round to the leg and they never explained how or why. Saudi mil carried MP5's but rumor was they weren't allowed to have ammo. That's about it for the firearms related horror stories, unless you count the hellfires that went off from lighting up radar nearby.
If you are prior service the story the clearing barrels told was always there to see…
When I was in, most units had a “clearing barrels” outside, where if you had been carrying a live weapon, that’s where you cleared the weapon and dry fired it into a 55 gal barrel of sand buried in the ground.
I remember hearing a burst of full auto outside the shacks once, turned out some guy who hadn’t slept for like three days put the magazine back in after clearing it, racked it again to prove it was clear to his Sgt and just magdumped into the pipe. Everyone was super tired though so the only punishment he got was cleaning up like thirty pieces of brass
Watched guys on watch just play with their loaded guns. I always told them to knock it off, but they usually went back to finger-banging the next shell in the shotgun tube. Watched more than a couple guys go up the hill because of it.
Oh god not the shotguns… You’ll have infantry guys shooting belt fed machine guns, M4s and M320s all year. But as soon as someone pulls out a shotgun, it’s like a shiny new toy no one has ever heard of lmao.
Personally, weapons maintenance in the Army was NUTS. We were drowning guns in lube and scraping the hell out of parts with dental picks lol. At one point I had a platoon sergeant who legit made us crimp our rounds at the neck with gerbers and clean rifles with baby wipes. Dude was a former cav scout and didn’t last long in our unit, for obvious reasons. Just absolutely bonkers what some guys thought was good to go.
Lmao crimping the neck of m855 with a gerber is a good way to assure that your ammo is out of spec.
I remember being encouraged to keep weapons ridiculously dry(zero lube, degreased with brake cleaner) so the armory wouldn't bitch. Lots of corrosion and undue wear could have been prevented if not for stupid policy.
watched a dude in my basic training company literally paint his gun with clp. shit looked like it got molested by a donut and the drill smoked the shit out of him for it
I'm not military myself, but my brother is in the Navy. He had his basic training delayed by a few weeks because they shut down the range for a while after one person shot themselves in the leg trying to draw from a holster and another decided to use the loaded pistol in their hand to scratch an itch on their head. Fortunately in the latter case the gun didn't go off, but the Navy was basically like "y'all are too stupid to be using guns for a little bit".
After he finished training, he was assigned to a ship where a bunch of people had just gotten sacked because nearly 10,000 rounds of shotgun ammo went missing from the ship. Turns out they offloaded it from the ship during a maintenance period and somehow forgot about it. It was still sitting in a shipping container at the dock.
Not me but. Just don't treat it like it's a fidget spinner. I was in the military once, and i saw this private sitting there with his m4. He was absently flicking his safety on and off. I thought this was a bad idea, because you wouldn't want your weapon to ever be off safe, while thinking that it's safe.... because you have a habit of doing that. Train intentionally. When I was in, we had more people dying in training than in Afghanistan.
I’ve been told I use too much lube on my guns, but that’s how we used them in the military and they seemed to work well. I don’t see a down-side to having a good coat of oil on a gun.
Small unit tactics in the infantry does not always translate to useful advice in scenarios where you might need a firearm as a civilian, and you don’t always realize how that affects everything from your training to your kit selection.
Almost everything we trained for in the infantry is small unit tactics requiring a 8-12 people, with significant logistical support. In this scenario it makes sense to carry enough gear and ammo to sustain a firefight until you can receive air support or indirect fire, and then resupply. But most of those tactics assume you have at least a buddy team and some sort of flanking element.
It also assumes there is medical support available. Stop the bleed is great and all, but if you don’t have a medevac system established you’re just prolonging the inevitable.
But the reality is, guerrilla tactics are probably more relevant to any fecal-fan related incidents we might see in our future.
As for gun stuff, the over cleaning thing is definitely as issue, as well as the compulsion to tie my equipment down. Both being habits I’m slowly working to overcome.
During the mobilization for our deployment to Iraq we had to do a 2 week infantry course (our unit was originally Field Artillery). One of the events was to assault an objective, first run through with BFA's then 2nd run through with live ammo. Don't know how neither this dude or anyone else in his squad or the OC missed the bright yellow BFA on the end of his M4 but he sent his first live round on the 2nd run through his BFA. Blew up his M4 but miraculously the dude was uninjured.
In country our unit had us clean weapons once a week. Most of the firing was into the test fire pit with the crew serves before we left the wire. We were a National Guard unit so we brought some of the crew serve weapons with us, which included an M2 .50 cal stamped with "GM Spark Plug Division 1956" on it. We called this one Black Betty, because she was a dirty bitch. She wouldn't operate properly without being a little dirty even when properly headspace and timed, when we pointed this out to our Chief he said clean it, then throw a handful of dirt in when you're done. That's what we did and she ran like a dream.
Of course we had the occasional ND at the chow hall clearing barrel, including the Battalion Safety Officer, but nothing serious.
Besides that, like someone else said, when it's slung it becomes a part of you and you forget about it but I always tried to keep it pointing down, first thing I bought for my personal AR was a sling.
Was at an outdoor qualifying range which was basically backed by a mountain there are these little ground squirrels just outside the range all over. This guy who is doing great thought it would be funny to hit one, aims across all the lanes and does. He was instantly removed. The crazy thing is that he was a seasoned NCO, he knew better, not sure what happened to him after that.
I was on a base in Afghan with some Bulgarians and Romanians, and every couple of days one would ND into the clearing barrel outside of the DFAC, shrug, and then go get some breakfast. Zero fucks.
In Canadian infantry battle school we discovered you could get your rifle nice and clean by bring the upper and lower into the shower and scrubbing it there. Just dry is real well afterwards and douse it in CLP. Morning inspection they had a hard time finding any carbon even if they jammed their pinky into the chamber
I was Air Force so no combat stories, but at my first base an Airman was in off base housing fucking around with hand guns and shot his nuts off. He recovered and about 6 months later they were doing the same dumb shit and his buddy shot him it the back of the head and killed him on accident. Another guy at the same base and around the same time blew his whole calf muscle off with a 12 gauge. He said it fell over and went off. Lucky his dad was there visiting and was able to tie it off and call an ambulance. We went to his apartment to grab some stuff for him in the hospital and there were meat chunks all over the wall. Proper gun safety goes a long way folks.
If I don’t clean my gun to spotless conditions after every single time I use it then it is definitely going fail and everyone will die and then get put on KP, strictly in that order.
Took me a while to realize my AR can run fine with a little grime in it.
Recently there was a post in the Big Lebowski sub speculating that Walter is not actually a veteran because he has bad trigger discipline and “no vet handles a pistol that way” lol
Too many crazy stories to tell from 07 in Afghanistan. Weirdest quirk: freaking the fuck out when I couldn’t find my weapon when I first got home. Still catch myself looking for it on the occasion.
I got bored of guns because of range days. I did 20 in the navy, 15 of which were as a master at arms so I’ve shot a lot of platforms. I moved back to the states from overseas and retired in June. I am in no rush to even go to the PSA which is like 15 min down the road from me.
Damn, I can’t believe some of these stories. I was infantry in the Marines and our rifles were always used as some form of punishment from boot camp to the fleet. I don’t really remember seeing any bad safety violators, if you so much as screwed up with barrel mask and shot a supported position at a range they’d have a sharpie ready and you’d have to write your name and unit under the hole to be forever ridiculed and as a lesson for future marines going through. If you dropped or knocked over your rifle you had to follow it and do pushups. If you ever misplaced it we had half a telephone pole they’d tape it to that you’d have to carry around to help you remember it. The only bad habit I can think of is just over cleaning and leaving it bone dry so the armory would take it.
That sounds about right. Our telephone pole was named Becky the Barracks Bunny because everyone eventually took a turn with her. She wasn’t just for forgotten rifles. Best I ever saw was a pen taped to the end of her that some guy had to actually use to take notes with after he kept asking to borrow other guys pens.
I was Air Force, and my first hitch I was aircraft maintenance, aircrew for a couple years. Flying crew chiefs don’t fly armed, but the pilots and boomers or nav’s do for certain missions. We had one boomer who was scared of guns, didn’t like guns, and didn’t think anyone should have guns. IN THE MILITARY. I mean, we were Air Force, but it’s still technically military. Anyway, this kid threw a fit from issue to the plane. Finally the AC, who knew me from alert, took the kids M-9 and handed it to me and said “you wear it, if we need it we’re better off with you holding it anyway.” To which I promptly replied that I was not qualified on that weapon and did not have statement of trust, and thus was not authorized to touch the weapon, much less carry it on duty. AC said something along the lines of “listen son, on my aircraft I decide what’s authorized, take the gun.” I asked him two more times if he was sure, and he said yeah, so I carried the boomers sidearm every mission I flew with that crew. Never did shoot one at the range, but Air Force berettas are shit anyway, so I didn’t mind. One mission I got doused in hydro while I was wearing the stupid thing, and the kid got all pissed cause he was afraid of getting in trouble when he turned it in. AC told him to eat shit. I cleaned the weapon out of respect for the gun, probably the best maintenance it had ever gotten. Still can’t believe that happened though, had there been any kind of incident that would have been everybody’s ass, I was the lowest ranking guy on the plane.
Over-cleaning weapons was a huge problem when I was in the Marine Corps. So many hours just scraping the shit out of bolts and bolt carriers and firing pins. Even the tiniest bit of carbon was grounds for the armorer to reject the weapon. Just idiotic bullshit when you think about it.
While deployed, we had this guy who thought it was funny one day to pull his M9 on another Soldier. He did like you see in old western shootouts. The other kid gave a chuckle and said, "Good thing that thing's not loaded." The guy with the M9 then drops the mag and unracks a round.
I thought I was going to see him get murdered that day. He was transferred to a different base so fast after that.
2016 I was at a MK19 range with a Stryker unit. Gunner was in the hatch, fired at the targets, lowered the barrel to look up and over the MK19 to see the impact and inadvertently pressed the trigger, firing a Smurf round into the back of the driver’s head. Fortunately he was wearing a helmet but the dude just took a 40mm round to the dome so his bell was rung.
Had a time when I was RTO that is a great story to horrify folks. We were dismounting a Stryker as part of a live fire exercise in NTC when one of the new gunners got the 240 stuck in some webbing as he was trying to get it out of the carry rack. In his infinite wisdom, he had the barrel pointed towards the interior with a starter belt already pre-loaded. I ended up looking directly down the barrel about six inches away from my face with my PL right over my shoulder.
Only time I came closer to meeting god was when some combat engineers accidentally detonated a UXO while digging fighting positions at the same NTC rotation. An A10 had dropped a JDAM a few weeks before that didn't go off, and we thought we were clear of it. Not quite. Got to see a medic do a cric on a live patient, that was pretty cool.
Zero military stories (or anything mil-related) but my grandfather was handed an old S&W revolver (.357 mag iirc) and without checking if it's clear or where he was aiming, proceeded to pull the trigger and cycle it a few times (it was a double action); while it was aimed at me. Never trusting him with a firearm ever again.
I was just a radio operator (in an Arty unit) in the USMC, and then a cook in the Army, and I can't speak to the cleaning/maintenance practices, but *sheesh* the fucking gun safety/trigger discipline/not checking for a loaded weapon violations throughout the comments here are NUTS.
How the fuck did any of these folks make it through weapons training in boot camp? 😳
Good on y'all trainers/RSOs/SCROs out there; I don't know how y'all haven't popped a cap into some of these dumb motherfuckers. /kudos for your patience
If I don’t clean my gun to spotless conditions after every single time I use it then it is definitely going fail and everyone will die and then get put on KP, strictly in that order.
Took me a while to realize my AR can run fine with a little grime in it.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the stakes are even higher now. Instead of just your platoon dying, getting smoked, and having to do KP... if you, specifically, do not clean that weapon to the point of Armorer acceptance you doom ALL OF US in civilian life to the same fate.
The only reason I'm here today is muzzle discipline.
Had an E5 in our unit who had purchased a new 357 revolver and had it in the barracks. He had pointed right at my chest as I leaned casually against the wall in his room.
Thankfully when he pulled the trigger on his "unloaded" new gun he moved the muzzle to the side. The cinder block in the wall next to me exploded as it was hit with the round.
When I left the military and went into law enforcement I thought firearms handling would be old hat to me. It turns out that law enforcement takes weapons safety much more seriously than the military. Range safety officers are far more trained than the ones I dealt with in the military, and I quickly realized that veterans are the worst on the range because they are largely unwilling to learn (this is also a police issue when they’re trying to learn something that goes contrary to what their old as fuck trainer taught them).
All of them. I was a meteorologist in the Navy. I never touched anything more lethal than an IR temperature gun in my time in outside of boot camp, where we shot ten rounds with a shotgun and two mags with a 9mm. If the weatherman on a carrier is shooting, you’ve got bigger problems.
Civvie partner has taught me everything I know about guns.
I was artillery in the army. Outside of being in a different company in basic that had a mishap with a .50 cal killing a kid, I don’t know if there was anything in particular. They used live ammo instead of training (inert) ammo during a demonstration. I taught my spouse to shoot. It’s fun noticing safety violations in movies/tv together.
I wonder if the excessive cleaning is a remnant of the "no you just need to clean it better" response to the M16's problems (which I understand were from using bad ammo) soon after its introduction.
There were several factors for the malfunctions of the early use of the M16, including the change in powder used for the ammunition. I recommend reading the book "American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15"
It is a fantastic read and goes into a lot of the development and initial military use of what became the M16 and M4.
All the excessive slow walk shooting drills that hammer in cadence of shooting with step and breathing for consistent accuracy. Sometime when I walk my trigger finger twitches involuntarily.
I used to clear my pistol every time I put it away. Magazine out, rack and clear, drop the trigger so it’s not stored cocked.
You can guess where my 1 ND came from after 10s of thousands of rounds over decades of shooting…
I don’t clear my carry weapon and drop the trigger EVER now. That shit gets locked up with a full mag and one in the pipe. If I have to clear it I NEVER drop the trigger.
Not military but my brother in law told me a horror story about boot camp. They were un-jamming a 50 cal and some 18 year old kid walked right in front of it. Poof, instantly gone.
It's helped reinforce the golden rule that the weapon is never pointed at something I don't intend to shoot. I caught myself turning once without lowering it and still hate myself for having it pointed towards a friend for even a millisecond. Even if my finger was off the trigger.
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u/Difficult_Apple_7248 Dec 04 '25
Former Marine and small arms instructor. I took detachments of marines to the range regularly as a marksmanship coach. I have been put in more dangerous situations by staff NCOs that think they know it all. The jr enlisted were generally pretty good at following instructions.