The 3 Most Common Safety Violations At The Gun Range

I love students who are willing to invest in themselves to come to a gun range and learn and train and practice. I've probably spent several thousand hours at this point (a relatively short number compared to some) on the range with students as either the instructor, assistant instructor, or silent observer. During this last weekend for example, at The 2025 Guardian Conference approximately 260 hours of instruction were given at the event and I was standing in a bay observing a lot of that.

It has been my experience, when we take American gun owners with varying degrees of training and experience in formal firearm training that there tend to be 3 specific behaviors that constitute about 98% of safety violations. Given the repetitive nature of these 3 behaviors I think it is valuable to review them for those of us who instruct, those of us who consider ourselves experienced shooters, and those who may be new to gun school.

Last but not least before we continue, you should know that when you call out shooters who practice these unsafe behaviors experience suggests to me they don't know they are doing it. Film yourself conducting some practice in a safe dry environment and then watch the video to see if you are prone to these failures… or just trust your instructor when they tell you are you doing it.

Here are the three most common mistakes I see—and why every shooter needs to be aware of them.

1. Unsafe Reholstering

Reholstering is one of the most dangerous parts of a training session. Think about it: the gun is often loaded, the trigger is exposed, and you’re moving the muzzle toward your own body. Yet too many shooters make mistakes in this process that are inherently dangerous.

The most common mistakes are muzzling your hand and inboarding the gun. Lets look at both.

Don't Muzzle Your Hand

This particular unsafe habit comes from using or having used soft holsters that collapse when you draw thus causing one to form the bad habit of pulling the holster open with the support hand while holstering the gun. If you have such a holster, remove it from your pants entirely and reholster safely before reinserting the now holstered gun back into your pants.

I think also this happens when someone isn't confident about where their holster is and feeling the holster with the support hand helps with proprioception, making it easier to find the holster and reholster the gun. If you can't see your holster, you might consider changing its position on your body or using your support hand to pull your gut or whatever out of the way so you can see it. Thrusting your hips forward or sideways or whatever you need to make it more visible can also be helpful.

You might also find it helps to have a proper sweatguard on your holster.

Don't Muzzle Your Body

Inboarding (other professionals may have other terms for this) is the habit of orienting your firearm toward your own body as you reholster.

This is a habit often built when using a soft holster that closes fully or partially when you draw. The user then “digs” the gun into the holster opening to force it open when they reholster. This is very dangerous, see comment above about soft holsters.

I see this most often when people position their holster on the hip or behind the hip. Once again I recommend moving the body out of your line of sight to the holster and then moving your hips to position the holster so you can reholster without muzzling your body.

2. Unsafe Direction During Administrative Handling

“Administrative handling” refers to all the times you touch the gun outside of live fire: loading, unloading, clearing malfunctions, or benching the firearm. These are the moments when shooters often forget about muzzle direction and in my experience it comes down to being distracted by the task you are performing.

Perhaps you generally train all by yourself on a private range and so you have a lot of flexibility when it comes to “safe direction” but when you are standing on a firing line with other students to your right and or left, orienting the gun more than about 10 degrees in either direction starts to cross the line of safety.

Keeping the gun pointed downrange is relatively easy to do when you are shooting and thus aiming at the targets located downrange. When you run out of ammo and need to reload, or worse something unexpected happens like a malfunction, that is when you are most likely to become flustered and start to turn your gun sideways as you “solve the problem.”

If you are newer to “gun school” then you might find your instructor asks you to unload and show clear or effectively unload your gun and lock the slide to the rear several times during the class. If you haven't had much experience with your gun you can find that doing this task feels very unnatural to do.

Your hands have to be in a specific position and you have to push up with your thumb as your other hand cycles the slide to the rear. Its an action that after a little repetition becomes easy and natural but at first its hard and requires both weird exertion and timing. I see guns go sideways a LOT when newer shooters are trying to learn that technique.

3. The Lingering Finger

The “lingering finger” is when your trigger finger stays on the trigger after it should have been removed. When the nature of the shooting exercise is simple this generally isn't an issue. Present to target, shoot 3 times, and then when finished reholster, is the kind of exercise that most shooters perform with good finger discipline.

However, when the student is asked to return to a ready position, move to a new shooting position, or do something other than finish and reholster, that is when we tend to see how strong your finger discipline habits really are.

The trigger finger should be removed from the trigger guard and put in a safe position when you are in ready positions, moving into a new shooting position or space, or doing anything administrative before you engage the target such as performing a reload or clearing a malfunction.

Final Thoughts

Unsafe reholstering, careless muzzle direction, and lingering fingers are the top three violations we see—and they’re also the easiest to fix with awareness and discipline. Safety is a skill, and like all skills it requires good practice and repetition to build.

Stay sharp. Slow down. Respect the firearm at every stage of handling. Doing so makes you safer, your training partners safer, and keeps the range open and enjoyable for everyone.