Although I’m more late to posting this than any other gun blogger at least I’m posting it (yeah this was a failure to bring breaking news). The people at Tactical Response shot a video that showed a cameraman down range while students were shooting.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqboR6gjOi8&e]
This is such a bad idea I don’t know where to begin. Let’s face it you don’t put a man down range when people are shooting. This is just asking for trouble. All it would take is a slight miss and you’d have on injured or dead cameraman. And anybody could make such a slip up no matter who good they are.
Source: http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2009/06/17/highly-controversial-training-video/
But James Yeager posted a video response on YouTube as well. Here is the video…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R3t0wuLDWQ&e]
Personally all he makes are excuses trying to justify a bad idea. The statement that really irks me is where he says nobody can be completely safe. I’ll give him the truth in that but there are easy and common sense things you can do to make something safe. For instance not placing somebody down range while people are actively shooting. This isn’t hard to do and it greatly increases safety. It’s akin to ensuring your gun is unloaded before you start cleaning it.
Seriously this guy is an idiot. When you fuck up don’t try to justify it just admit you’re only human and you made a mistake.
Dear god. What the fuck was Yeager thinking? He’s normally way smarter than this. Jesus Christ.
I mean, this was during a CLASS, with STUDENTS. If it were the instructors demonstrating something, and they made reasonably sure that a cameraman downrange wouldn’t be at too high of a risk, such as being many feet away from a target, and they weren’t doing drills or anything, then maybe, maybe I could understand that. But, that cameraman was 1 fucking foot away from the poa/poi during a drill. There is no excuse for that.
Shame on tactical response for doing something like that.