Safe handling, clearing and proving a firearm safe

The third class meets in the equipment room at the station, beside the clearing station where Brandon Pell's pistol fired in March 2025. Ferris has asked the students to look at it before they sit down. It is a steel cylinder about the height of a kitchen bin, angled toward the floor and filled with a dense material designed to capture a bullet. A laminated sign hangs above it. A small hole near the top of the lining, now patched, is the only sign of what happened. 'That hole is the most expensive training aid in this building,' Ferris says. 'It cost an officer his pride, a lot of paperwork and a few nights of sleep. It cost nobody their life, because the station was designed for the day someone would make a mistake.'

This lesson is about the moments when firearms are most often handled and least often used: loading and unloading at the start and end of a shift, handing a firearm to an armourer or another officer, securing a firearm found during a search, and cleaning. Most unintended discharges in police services happen during these routine moments, not in confrontations. The lesson describes the principles of safe handling and the general steps that public safety courses teach for proving a firearm safe. It does not teach anyone to operate a particular firearm. That happens on the range, with the service's own firearms and instructors.

Why routine handling is dangerous

Routine handling combines the conditions in which people make mistakes: repetition, distraction, fatigue and confidence. An officer who has unloaded a duty pistol two thousand times can do it without thinking, which is useful until the day something is different. The magazine is not seated properly, the officer is talking, a colleague is waiting, the shift has run long. Studies of errors in many fields find the same thing: experienced people make fewer mistakes overall, but the mistakes they do make often happen during tasks they have done so often that they have stopped paying attention.

That is why police services surround routine handling with rules that seem fussy to new recruits. Load and unload only at a designated clearing station. Do it one officer at a time. Do not talk while doing it. Point the muzzle into the clearing barrel throughout. Check the firearm by looking and by feeling, not just by remembering. Never hand a firearm to someone else without showing them it is unloaded and having them check it too. Each rule adds a small layer of protection.

Proving a firearm safe

The Canadian Firearms Safety Course teaches a five-step check for making sure a firearm is unloaded, using the memory aid PROVE: point the firearm in the safest available direction, remove all ammunition, observe the chamber, verify the feeding path, and examine the bore for obstructions. Police training uses the same idea, adapted to the service's own firearms. The order matters. The muzzle goes in a safe direction first, so that if anything goes wrong during the check, nobody is hurt. The ammunition source is removed before the chamber is checked, so that the chamber cannot be refilled by accident. Then the shooter looks, and in many courses also feels, to confirm that nothing remains.

Two points about the check are emphasized in every course. First, the check is visual and physical. It is easy to glance at a chamber in poor light and see what you expect to see, so instructors ask officers to look carefully and, where the design allows, to confirm by touch. Second, the person receiving a firearm checks it again, even if they just watched it being checked. 'Two checks by two people is not an insult,' Ferris says. 'It is the system working.'

Ferris returns to the clearing station incident. Pell's mistake was in the order. He removed the magazine, which is the main ammunition source, but he had not yet cleared and checked the chamber, and his finger was inside the trigger guard while he was handling the pistol. In that moment, the firearm still held a round. 'He did a step from memory and skipped the part where you look,' she says. 'That is the most common pattern I see.'

Handing over a firearm

Police officers hand firearms to others more often than the public might think: to an armourer for inspection, to an evidence technician, to a range instructor, to a supervisor after a shooting. Every service sets out how this must be done. The general principles are the same everywhere. The firearm is made safe and proven unloaded before it is handed over, unless the circumstances make that unsafe or an evidence rule says otherwise. The muzzle stays in a safe direction during the transfer. Where the design allows, the action is left open so the receiver can see that it is empty. The person receiving it checks it again before doing anything else. The transfer is recorded when the firearm is changing custody, so that the service always knows who is responsible for it.

Ontario's rules require services to keep records of the firearms they issue, and services keep logs showing which officer has which firearm at all times. These records matter. A service that cannot account for a firearm has a serious problem, and the first question in any firearms incident is whose weapon it was.

Firearms found or seized by police

Officers regularly come across firearms they did not issue: a handgun found during a search, a rifle surrendered by a family worried about a relative, a firearm left at the scene of a crime. These firearms are evidence, property or both, and they present special risks. Nobody knows how they have been stored, whether they are loaded, whether they have been modified or whether they work properly.

Services treat found firearms with extra caution. In general, the first officer secures the firearm where it is, keeps everyone away from the muzzle and does not handle it unless necessary to make the scene safe. Where possible, the firearm is photographed in place before it is touched, because its position and condition may be evidence. A trained officer or technician then makes it safe and proves it unloaded, documenting what was found. The firearm is packaged in a way that shows it is unloaded, such as with the action open and a cable tie through it, and it is labelled and logged. Some services require an officer with specific training, or a forensic firearms technician, to unload firearms of unfamiliar types. 'If you do not know how a firearm works,' Ferris says, 'the right thing is to leave it pointed somewhere safe, keep people away from it and call someone who does.'

What changed after the clearing station incident

Ferris led the review of the March 2025 incident. She interviewed Pell, the officer he was talking to and the sergeant on duty, and looked at the shift schedule. The review found that Pell had broken two safety rules, that he had reported the discharge immediately and honestly, and that the circumstances, a thirteen-hour shift ending after a fatal collision and a conversation at the clearing station, had made the mistake more likely.

The service required Pell to complete remedial firearms training with Ferris before he carried a firearm again, which took nine days. Because the discharge involved a failure to follow the firearms safety procedures, it was reported to the police service board, and Pell received a written reprimand under the service's discipline process. He has had no further incidents. Pell agreed to let the service use the incident, with his name, in training, and he spoke to the 2025 recruit class about it.

The service also changed its procedures. A sign above the clearing station now lists the steps in order. Only one officer may use the clearing station at a time, and the officer at the station does not talk to anyone until finished. Supervisors were reminded to watch for officers ending long shifts and to make sure they were not rushing. The range added a fatigue scenario to the annual requalification, in which officers unload and prove their firearms safe at the end of a long, distracting exercise. 'None of these changes is clever,' Ferris says. 'They just make it a little harder to do the dangerous thing without noticing.'

Jesse Morningstar asks whether Pell should have been punished more harshly. Desjardins says that the question goes to the heart of a safety culture. If the service had fired Pell, other officers might hide their own near misses. If it had done nothing, it would have sent the message that safety rules do not matter. A written reprimand, remedial training and a change to the system was, in the service's judgment, the balance between accountability and learning. 'Reasonable people could disagree about the exact sanction,' Desjardins says. 'What matters is that the service treated it as both a personal failure and a system failure, and fixed both.'

The supervisor's check is simple. First, read down the proof check column and flag any unloading without one. Second, compare each officer's start and end times with everyone else's: two uses overlap when each one starts before the other ends. Doucet used the station from minute 3 to 5 and Patel from minute 4 to 5 overlapped it, which breaks the one-officer rule, and Patel's missing proof check is the second flag.

The log is invented, but the idea is real. Some services use simple records like this, kept by supervisors or built into an equipment-room system, to make sure routine handling rules are followed and to spot patterns before they cause an incident.

Cleaning and maintenance

Cleaning a firearm is another routine moment when people are relaxed and attention drifts. Many unintended discharges outside police work happen while someone is cleaning a firearm they believed was unloaded. The general rules are simple: prove the firearm unloaded first, remove all ammunition from the room where the cleaning is done, follow the service's or manufacturer's procedure and keep the muzzle in a safe direction even while cleaning. Police services usually limit what officers may do themselves to routine cleaning and inspection; anything more is done by a certified armourer. Lesson 7 returns to maintenance.