Reality check...I'm tone deaf.

Just got in from hearing tests at work. Since it's a new job it's my "baseline" otological check. I'm 31, and already starting to feel the effects. The numbers in bold are the frequency, the numbers below represent percentage of loss.

This is with 20+ years of unprotected shooting as I only really started wearing protection a few years ago. Looks like I'm going to pay for it.

Don't do this to yourself. Eyes and ears are very important when shooting, mowing, running loud tools...just don't be dumb like me.

As a child of the 80s, I grew up in the bridge between kids with untold freedom and kids sheltered by their parents and raised by the tv. All those changes in the way people raised kids happened at some point in time, I grew up when safety glasses and earplugs became more mainstream, but still weren't universally accepted and certainly weren't universally demanded.

To ask who would let a kid shoot without hearing protection is a slam to a whole bunch of us here. That insinuates that you believe our parents to be bad parents. No qualifier on whether it was accepted, demanded, or even thought of. Who lets their kids leave home after lunch without a cell phone and tell them to just get home before dark...are they bad parents too? Were they just the parents of the fifties and sixties who did what was normal? Who would build a house out of asbestos? Who would let a kid ride in a car without a seatbelt? Are they all bad parents and bad people?

I'm sorry if I took that comment wrong, but I see it as an insult to the parents on this forum, and the people here who have parents that let them shoot without ears on. In the last couple decades, yeah it's been pretty common. Before then, much less so.

RX-79G said:

If you are 31 and have been shooting for 20+ years, we are talking about 1995.

Who didn't know about hearing protection for shooting in 1995? Were the health benefits of smoking hotly contested way back then, too?

Click to expand...

We are talking about 25 years. An entire generation ago. Do I need to explain from a Safety Professionals viewpoint the history of hearing protection from the late 1940s Air Force standards to 1980 when it became normalized DOD protocol to protect the hearing of servicemen...or until 1980 when it was written as 29cfr1910.95...or thaw late 90s when MSHA promulgated standards for hearing protection. Yep, standards were in place, but the OSH act signed by Nixon? was weak until the Clinton administration beefed up the power of OSHA and staffed it well enough to get the attention of general industry so that they would actually follow the standards. That's how most people learned about hearing conservation, OSHA mandated programs at work...during the Clinton administration.

I could go at it from a different angle, social history...throughout history people lost hearing as they got older. It was accepted that at older ages you couldn't hear as well. It was quite recently that people started understanding that loud noises caused small injuries that add up. Couple the recent realization to natural human stubbornness and you get what we had in the 80s until today. People do things one way for however long and then are forced to try to change a behavior and a way of thinking. Doesn't happen overnight, happens over a few generations. My dad grew up not wearing ear pro, he made me do it when he remembered to do it himself when he went to a factory in 95. It was fairly rare but I did occasionally wear earpro as a kid...better than he did. If I ever have kids they will do better than I did and so forth until it just becomes normal. That's how change happens.

A lot of people today have a twisted view of the world as if everybody grew up how they did, knew what they knew and experienced what they experienced themselves. That's just not the case. Different things happen in different places at different times for no apparent reason. Where I grew up nobody really though much of hearing protection but by durn nobody smoked at the gas station. Kinda wierd how that happens.

I said all that to illustrate this point. Just because something is normal in one place it may not be normal in other places. The words you used were offensive to me because at first it felt like an attack on my father...and it was. It was also an attack on the parents here that have let their kids shoot without eyes and ears on. It was an attack on the parents of most of our members here since most members are at least as old as I am if not older. Please stop and realize that there is no universally understood thoughts, ideas, or practices. Each thing we do or think as humans is a learned behavior or idea. It takes a while for an idea in a small group to become popular in a large population.