To be blunt, if you fire even a single round at the shooting range or in your shop with the Snail Trap without high-quality eye and ear protection, you are a total moron. One simple question, how much hunting, shooting or tinkering on guns are you going to be doing when you are blind? I suppose you can still do most of that if you are deaf, but it won’t be fun and your success will be less than sterling.
It takes about a millionth of a second to lose your sight and you can’t know when it’s coming. Your gun or the guy’s next to you can blow up, it can potentially happen to any gun at any time. But the possibility of splash back from the bullet is just as real. My cousin Philip can attest to that. He was hit in the leg by splash back and it penetrated through his new jeans and stopped when it hit his femur and cracked it. Philip is a big, rugged guy with muscular legs and if it penetrated to the bone on his thigh, it would certainly have taken out his eye with no problem.
Save your money, buy the best shooting glasses you can afford and wear them every single time you fire a gun. No exceptions.
Hearing loss is not so immediate, but is instead a cumulative effect. Every time you fire a gun without ear protection you lose a little more hearing. If you don’t think that can add up, ask an old shooter from your grandfather’s generation when they rarely wore ear protection. But write the question down, because I doubt he will hear you.
I have been lucky to meet several of the old gun writers whose work I had been reading for years. They all seemed to have the same limited vocabulary.
“Huh?”
“What?”
It makes for lousy conversation.
For more advice and insight on firearms and gunsmithing, purchase Gunsmithing Made Easy by Bryce M. Towsley from Gun Tests.
