You’ll do it in the next three weeks if you haven’t already. It gets gray and wet and forty degrees, the outdoor club stops being fun around two in the afternoon, and you start driving to the indoor place instead.
Same guns. Same ammo. Completely different thing happening to your ears.
An outdoor range has a sky over it. That’s not a small detail — it’s most of the engineering. The blast leaves the muzzle and a good portion of it goes up and out and never comes back to you. Now put that same shot inside a concrete box with a steel backstop and a hard ceiling, and nothing leaves. It bounces off the walls, off the floor, off the baffles, and it comes back at you from four directions a half second behind itself.
Then somebody sets up two lanes over with a braked rifle.
That’s the one that’ll get you, and it’s worth understanding why, because it isn’t about how big his gun is. A muzzle brake works by taking gas that was going forward and throwing it sideways. Forward is away from everybody. Sideways is directly into the lanes on either side of him. The guy shooting it is behind the thing. You’re beside it. He is having a more pleasant afternoon than you are and he does not know it.
Here’s the part nobody takes seriously enough, and I say that as somebody who didn’t.
Hearing damage doesn’t hurt. There’s no sharp pain, no moment where you know it happened, nothing that makes you stop. You walk out, things sound a little flat and muffled for a few hours, and by dinner it seems fine. So you file it under nothing.
It wasn’t nothing. It just doesn’t bill you the same day. It bills you in your fifties, at a restaurant, when your wife is across the table and you can hear that she’s talking but you’ve lost the consonants, and you nod because asking “what?” a fourth time is worse than guessing. And the ringing that shows up in a quiet house at eleven at night doesn’t go away. There’s no procedure for it. There’s no supplement for it. That’s it, that’s the rest of your life.
So the indoor season is the right time to fix the one gear decision most people have never actually made.
Double up. Plugs in, muffs over the top of them, every time you’re inside. Not plugs or muffs — both. This is near-universal practice among people who shoot indoors a lot and it costs you nothing but the two seconds it takes to put plugs in before the muffs go on.
And here’s the thing about plugs that almost everybody gets wrong, including me for about a decade. Foam plugs are not earbuds. They don’t go in the opening and sit there. You roll the plug down thin between your fingers, reach over your head with the other hand to pull your ear up and back, slide it well into the canal, and hold it while it expands. If it’s sticking out where you can see it from the front, it isn’t doing the job it was designed to do and the number printed on the package doesn’t apply to you.
Electronic muffs are the other piece, and the reason isn’t comfort. It’s that passive muffs make you deaf to the range officer, and a guy who can’t hear a cease-fire starts taking them off between strings — which is exactly when the lane beside him touches one off. Electronics let you keep them on the whole time you’re inside the room.
Last thing, and it’s the one people skip because it feels like overkill. Wear them from the door, not from the lane. The sound doesn’t respect the firing line. Plenty of guys walk the length of a hot range to get to lane nine with their muffs in their hand.
Everything else in this hobby you can replace. You can buy another gun, another optic, another safe. Scratch a stock and a guy can fix it.
You get one set of ears and they do not have an aftermarket.
