Thomas Sowell on Disarming Marines Holding Loaded Pistols

 From Thomas Sowell's autobiography A Personal Odyssey. It is well worth reading in full.

Safety is much more a problem on a pistol range than on a rifle range, simply because it is so much easier to accidentally point a loaded pistol at someone. While we stressed safety to everyone, we learned from experience that there were great differences in the extent to which safety rules were observed. Combat veterans were the safest shooters. They needed no reminder that firearms were dangerous. Next in safety were Marines from units trained for combat, like the Second Marine Division. When you got to people who had civilian-like jobs, things got lax and dangerous if you didn’t stay on top of them. Then when you had shooters who were in fact civilians – reservists - things got dicey, as you would find them casually pointing the pistol in all directions, gesturing with it, and in general being a menace. More than once, I had to take a loaded .45 from some reservist’s hands – a somewhat delicate operation-because he was paying no attention at all to where he was pointing it.

Emphasis mine. I wonder what he actually did. I can picture him gently reaching for the gun with outstretched arms and splayed fingers and plucking the gun from a confused reservists' hands. I can also picture him doing a krav maga style gun disarm, trapping the side of the gun against his body and forcefully twisting it out of the reservist's hands. Presumably it was not the latter, as this would seem to have a high chance of spooking the trainee and making him pull the trigger.