Protection
This strip and the next made me realize that I’d goofed. Originally, the name of the shop (in the very first comic, even) was “Cheap AS Your Mom”. Somewhere along the line, as I drew more and more strips, it became “Cheaper THAN Your Mom”, and I had to go back and edit the first strip to reflect this.
On the subject of eye/ear protection:
I do still know a few “hardcore gunners” (they both did stints in the military in the 1970s) who eschew such things. They’re being stupid. I did a lot of shooting in my youth without proper eye and ear barriers, and I’m paying for it now. My hearing is slightly damaged – only a tiny bit, but we were firing thousands of rounds of .22 LR. If I could go back, I would have never gone plinking without at least plugs in my damn ears. And I would never, ever fire my .357 without something to protect, unless my life was on the line. I have a funny story about that – the time I nearly got in a fistfight at a local range. Tell it another time.
Some people mistake the concept of eye protection as “protection against a bullet.” This is inaccurate. Eye protection with guns is not for stopping a bullet. That’s silly. With extremely few exceptions, a pair of goggles or glasses are NOT going to stop a bullet fired at you. Glasses are to protect you against other dangers – a bouncing, hot, ejected shell flying back in your face, for instance. Or a ricochet. Or a revolver spitting hot powder out the sides. Do you need it, most times? No. But the times it protects your eyes, you will be DAMNED happy to have it on.
The only time I did use a gun without protection was a security detail; let’s just say my ears were ringing afterwards and I had to wash out my eyes. I’ve always taken protection for hunting and target practice. Even if I was doing open field shooting. It’s stupid not to considering that while if you do a bit here and there is one thing. With automatics today, the chance a round flips up into the face from recoil you can hurt yourself with brass causing an eye or face injury.
I’ve seen seen a .40 brass round hit someone in the mouth and chip a tooth because the shooter was chewing gum and smiling like a goober. So we had to take them to the base hospital and I had to fill out an accident report as a witness. I wrote in the statement the officer in question stated a movie line and then proceeded to fire “I’m here to chew bubble gum and kick ass!”. I got a call from the local safety center over it and they supposedly put it in the Friday Follies, a catch all of idiocy of the week done by Navy and Marines.
For any ladies reading, a high-collared shirt (not a turtleneck, just NOT LOWCUT) is definitely recommended, as well. Getting a hot shell popped into your cleavage is NOT fun, though everyone else seemed to think it was hilarious.
closed-toe shoes are also HIGHLY recommended. hot shells ‘twixt the toes hurts like a mofo, or so i’m told.
and a baseball cap can help keep shells out of the glasses, though i know many women refuse to wear such things. i insist all the newbs i take to the range wear hats with their eyes and ears.
If I had thought about it, I would’ve been wearing a hat. I’m ALWAYS in closed-toe shoes, if for no other reason than my doofus husband will accidentally step back and stomp on me because he can’t hear me behind him.
I have always had ears and eyes on while shooting, apart from once. I didn’t have my left ear on at a thousand yard range, as I was in conversation, and someone touched off a .308 about 8 feet away. After that one shot, my left ear was ringing and slightly painful. I’ve always been careful about ears since.
As for eyes, I have several stories of me being lucky, and avoiding potentially major injury. The one that occurs first is when I shot a .22 in an indoor range and had a small bit of splash come back and bounce off my glasses. The other actually wasn’t while shooting, but could have been much worse than it was. I was in the passenger seat of a convertible when we were forced off the road and the drivers side mirror swiped a post. A shard of broken mirror about 2″ long bounced off the left lens of my glasses and nicked my eyebrow. If I hadn’t been wearing glasses, it’s entirely possible I’d be monocular right now. This isn’t to say that glasses should be worn at all times, but merely that when you are in a situation where you KNOW potentially damaging bits of metal and gas are going to be flying around, it’s foolhardy not to protect your eyes. Being monocular really sucks (which is a story for another time.)
Flying springs, hot brass, sand, grass, leaves, gravel, fan sprays of red hot sparks, part of an exploding receiver, pieces of dremel cutoff wheel, chunks of broken grinding disk … this is an incomplete list of the things that have BOUNCED OFF OF MY GLASSES. Always wear eye protection. Always wear ears, too. The shit you save WILL be your own.
@jlgrant
One more minor discrepancy to edit: at the bottom edge of your comic you’ve lettered “WWW.FTFCOMICS.COM” the last couple of days, but the url up there has a hyphen in it.
You do understand that I’m only bitching about this because I love this comic already, so I want it to be the best it can be? 🙂
I like two lumps, but I’ve been waiting for you to do something else since flem died. This comic is relevant to my interests, despite the fact I’ve never shot a firearm; the story seems interesting so far and I hope to learn something along the way.
That’s what I’m *snerk* SHOOTING for. I hope the storyline will be accessible to non-shooters as much as the gun crowd. I’ll warn you – it’s not going to be as horrific as FLEM. Hank will not be in the strip. There will be no gratuitous gun violence, and no Mormon hunting. But there will be other kinds of violence, and lots, lots, lots of crazy, fucked-up shit.
A bestfriend and i also are thinking about creating a good blogs web page, though you have no idea which one to use. Many of us fundamentally is going to you have to be publishing arbitrary goods around in no way we really wish for the web site to become enjoyable in addition to decorating, not a drab layout..
Congratulations. I can’t tell if this is spam or not…