I remember being HORRIFIED while watching "Come fly away!" a BBC fly-on-the-wall series about airports. At my local airport - Lulsgate (Bristol airport) - two cops armed with H&K MP5s were patrolling the airport, and one was "taken short" (a polite way of saying "urgently needed to urinate"). SHe handed her Hockler to her colleague with the words "it's not loaded"... (which I took to mean that, while there was live ammunition in the magazine, none had been transferred to the chamber ready for firing. The H&K fires from a closed bolt, making it inherently more accurate than most other SMGs, like the Sterling.)The colleague took temporary custody of the weapon... AND DIDN'T CHECK THE CLAIM. Holding a firearm and believing that it's not loaded simply because someone else told you it wasn't...is disgraceful. ALL GUNS ARE LOADED, ALWAYS. Behave as if that was true, and you'll never shoot yourself with a "Not loaded" gun - because you'll treat every gun the same way - as dangerous. You might recall the gag in the Pink Panther movies, where Dreyfus is given a lighter by his wife, which looks exactly like his rather ineffectual service pistol. He puts a cigar in his mouth, picks up the lighter... and shoots off the tip of his nose. I drummed into my son the idea that ALL guns are REAL, and ALL GUNS ARE LOADED. Hopefully with success - I don't want him shooting of the end of HIS nose! In the USA, the number of people who are shot each year by/with guns that they believed to be unloaded is frightening - particularly as it's avoidable, and the result of poor training.