Perhaps the key to safety in your workshop is to have a fine understanding of the concept of leverage.
That may seem an odd statement. People would say that keeping the shop tidy, maintaining the equipment, or wearing safety glasses or a face-shield and so on – that those are the keys to being safe in your workshop.
However, I keep proving to myself that safety equipment can only do so much. The fact is, if I am wearing safety glasses and something flies up and hits me in the face, then I’m probably doing something that I shouldn’t be doing. Namely, I am somehow imparting too much energy to some object in the wrong way – namely, leverage.

There is, of course, the standard step-on-a-garden-rake scenario you see in slapstick comedies, and it comes in any number of varieties. You may think your shop is tidy, but there’s always something waiting to play the rake. Walk around enough and it’ll find you.
It’s far more dangerous than that, though. My guess is most injuries in the shop occur when the operator allows the device he’s using to gain greater leverage over the weapon. What’s the weapon? Every piece of wood, every nail, every screw, every drill bit in your shop.

How does leverage work? Basically, you have control over one end of something, the tool has control over the other end, and the fence, table, work-surface, sawhorse, etc is the pivot point. What follows is a battle of control.
Everyone is guilty of ignoring the basic idea. You need a piece of wood that’s already 3 inches long to be just a bit shorter so you take it over to the mitre saw. You slap it into position and fire up the 10 or 12 inch blade and before you know it, the wood is turned sideways, chewed up, and you are marvelling at the fact that your hand didn’t go with it.
Easy: 12 inch blade at 4000000 rpm (exaggeration, but you get the point) is powerful – your arm is not fuelled by Popeye’s spinach so it’s probably not strong enough to actually stop the blade. Think of the ever-shortening piece of wood as your increased attempts to grab the spinning blade with your hand. What’s really happening is the pivot point is too close to where you hold the wood and the saw ends up with greater leverage. Nothing needs to slip for this to happen, nothing needs to go wrong. If you manage to cut it without having the saw rip it out of your hand, you’re just lucky.
The same is true with drilling a hole in a piece of steel or aluminum. If the piece is big, the strength of the drill disappears and it can’t possibly grab and turn it. But the smaller it gets, the more likely that piece of metal will become a miniature circular saw blade. Don’t hold it with your fingers. It’ll hurt.

And there’s a reason lathe chisels have long handles. There’s a reason you are supposed to keep the tool-rest as close to the wood as possible. You never want that machine to gain leverage.
When I was in high school, there was a piece of plywood fastened to the wall behind the lathe. It was covered in red marks from the red handles of the chisels that had been flipped at it by the machine ineptly operated. The wall itself was drywall on steel studs and the plywood was to keep it from getting punched full of holes.
Perhaps a better idea would be to try to protect the operators by explaining to them that you can’t make your baseball bat smooth with the roughing gouge with the tool rest two inches away from the wood, holding the chisel with one hand like a tennis racquet, while looking the other way talking to someone else who is also busy ineptly operating some other machine.
That reminds me of one incident that happened in that high-school shop. A guy was making a crib board using the band saw. (I’m not sure that band saw was used for anything else, actually.) There’s not much to tell – he wasn’t paying attention until he’d cut halfway up his fingernail pushing it into the blade.
But, that’s not an instance of leverage.

Now, we should not forget the mighty tablesaw. Its premium way of taking control of what you are cutting is binding, and that may not be your fault. But if you continue to push through the piece of wood that is getting so twisted as you cut it that it binds against the fence, then whatever happens is your fault.
Setting aside binding, though, we must talk about leverage. There is a very very easy way to know if you’re inviting the saw to shoot you with some wood. If you are attempting to cut something between the blade and the fence that is shorter than the blade, you are asking for it. That is, you have your 2×3 inch piece of wood and are going to cut a bit off the 3 inch length. Well, maybe you will, maybe you won’t.
Of course, the diagonal measure of that piece of wood is greater than 3 inches – and so greater than the distance of the fence from the blade. If the wood turns any amount even close to one degree, the blade will fire it at you. You can’t stop it with your hand. And if you’re using a stick or something to push it through, you not only increase the likelihood of the wood turning, you are giving the saw more things to throw at you.
Whatever you use to push the wood through the saw has to be able to fully transfer your firm hold of the material. You can’t do that with a chopstick.

You need to control the material – you don’t actually control the saw. The machine is how it is; it does what it does. It doesn’t like you at all. So you shouldn’t do anything that enables it to harm you.
As a parting tip, and since I know many of you like to use pine, keep an eye on loose knots. When ripping a pine board, a loose knot can start to move out of the wood and then, depending on its attitude, become a truly nasty bullet. You’ll be thankful for your safety glasses.