And then there're my own guns within my own home that are stored in my safe that I know for an absolute fact are or are not loaded. Both conditions exist and I know which are which. Because I made them that way. I'm not about to be paranoid/a safety Sally about what I already know is not, and in some cases, has never once been, a loaded firearmHonest discussion, no offense intended towards anyone, but the whole "every gun is loaded" thing has always been a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
I can understand a safety instructor with a room full of rowdy teenage boys (or other newbies) using this statement to hammer the concept in. It's life-and-death stuff, That gun is loaded and you will respect it. Cavalier firearm handling can and does result in tragedy. I do understand the statement in this context.
The problem I have with it is that it's not technically/literally true, of course. I do tend to be overly logical in some ways, and my logical mind rebels at saying a gun is loaded, when you don't know if it is or is not. It's logical to me to say that you must treat every gun as a loaded gun, whether it is or isn't. It's illogical to say that a firearm literally has live ammo in the chamber, when you don't know.
For safety's sake, you absolutely assume a gun to be loaded until proven otherwise, but if you walk into a museum and tell the curator that each and every firearm hanging on the wall literally has a live cartridge in the chamber, they'll call security and have you removed from the premises. Yes, there is that (extremely remote) possibility that somehow one got loaded, and they must be treated as such, but in a very literal, practical sense, no, no they are not loaded.
Yes I know I'm overly literal-minded. Yes, I understand why safety instructors say things like this. I'm just explaining why it doesn't work for me.
One of my boys is even more literal-minded than I am (I wonder about that kid sometimes ), and if I told him that a gun was loaded, and he checked to see that it wasn't, he would wonder why I lied to him. However, I have trained them to always handle every gun as a loaded gun. There is no cavalier or careless gun handling here.