I am totally exhausted today.  After work, I drove 30 minutes into Surrey to take the Firearm license training.  It is 4 hours of lectures and practice after a long day of work.  In Canada, it is required by law to acquire the firearm license in order to own a gun.  The license exam is on safety and regulations.  It has two parts written exam and partical exam.  In the course, we are not allow to discharge any weapon, but there are lots of disactiviated real gun for us to practice proper handling.  We are taught all the new terminologies used in firearm and hunting, different parts of guns, types of guns and bullets, shooting and carrying position, etc.  Although there are tons of new materials I have to memorize, I found the lecture is very interesting, even the history of guns section.  The instructor even perform a small expreiment, show us the difference between lighting black powder and smokeless powder.  Now I know the real gun powder doesn’t look like anything they use in the movie.  Technically speaking, gun powder is not explosives but propellent, which push the bullet down the bore and shot out from the barrel.

In the pratical exam, we have to demostrate we can handle 5 types of rifle and 4 types of handguns safely by follow the ACTS and PROVE procedure.  So, after the classroom time, the instructor let us play with the guns.  We are not really playing with the guns.  We are just repeatly unloading every gun, inspect all the check points, then load it back, pretend to fire, unload the gun once again before putting it down.  Putting your finger into the trigger or pointing the gun to anyone is an instant fail in the exam.  Gun has to handle with great care.

Contrary to popular beliefs, firearm is actually very safe if you know what you are doing.  In Canada, only 1300 death from firmarm, much lower than the toll of death from automobile or cigerrates.  As a sport, shooting has a much lower death ate than swimming.  Many people’s phobia to guns are unjustified, and it mostly rooted from the myth created by all those Hollywood movies.