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Carry guns with safeties
- Thread starter Thinking
- Start date
BREWINZ
NES Member
Just a decocker. No safety.
OP says he carries a Sig 938. Maybe work with your friend and suggest this pistol. I changed my ccw to a 938 and plan on it being my main Ccw. Reason being I can shoot it ridiculously well. With my hands getting arthritic my 642 and Bodyguard are taking a back seat.
The new beretta m9 they made for the army then the army didnt want it.
cfbackrow
NES Member
almost impossible to find...been looking for a long time
DPR
NES Member
If they do find a gun that fits those requirements I believe that after a short time they will wish they did not have the safety on a DA/SA. DA/SA is a great option. Sig P239 is single stack but overall not much smaller overall than a p229 double stack. However it is easier to conceal than a 229. For a small pistol that 938 is a sweet unit, easy to conceal and a great shooter. Probably going to come down to whether he prefers SA with a safety or DA/deccok. I prefer the latter. If he is near Harvard Saturday I could show him the 229 and 239 with some holsters. Good luck.
DarthRevan
NES Member
Duh obviously he wants a Beretta
/thread
/thread
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I'm with some of the other posters here. I click my mouse with my safety.
The HK P30sk comes with or without, and I assure you the DA trigger is stout. Plaxico Buress couldn't even squeeze that by mistake. Cant go wrong with HK or SIG as many have suggested here.
45collector
NES Member
I'll be a one-upper and say Makarov 9x18.
oldguy68
NES Member
So did he buy the S&W Shield in 9mm yet...
Inquiring minds want to know..![[smile]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/001.gif "Smile [smile]")
All I would do to the Shield is add an Apex duty/carry kit.
Around $370.00 for the pistol and around $80.00 for the Apex kit.
The pistol is made here in MA with American pride and a lifetime warranty!
Inquiring minds want to know..
All I would do to the Shield is add an Apex duty/carry kit.
Around $370.00 for the pistol and around $80.00 for the Apex kit.
The pistol is made here in MA with American pride and a lifetime warranty!
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If you ask me (which, by posting, implicitly you did), I'd say that your friend's insistence that a pistol have both a DA/SA hammer-fired trigger mechanism and an external manual safety displays a dangerous lack of understanding about how firearms work.
When I was younger, it was accepted that one could not really learn how to drive a motor vehicle unless he had at least some understanding of how they work. I admit that in today's instant gratification society the wisdom of this precept seems to have been lost -- which may be the best argument to date in favor of self-driving cars. Unfortunately, though, the same admonition applies to firearms: you will have grave difficulty learning to handle them safely unless you understand how they work.
The external manual safety is thought to exist to reduce the risk of an unintended discharge attributable to sufficient wayward trigger finger action as to cause the gun to fire. Perhaps they do reduce that risk, but that is not why they exist. Rather, an external manual safety exists because of two precepts that define single action firearms. No. 1: the hammer and mainspring are cocked. No. 2: the amount of sear engagement (which is what prevents that cocked hammer/mainspring firing force from being released) is necessarily small. The concern is that if such a firearm is dropped, trigger momentum or sear momentum (or what is sometimes referred to as "sear bounce") could cause the sear engagement to become disengaged, causing the hammer to fall and the firearm to discharge.
Emblematic of the external manual safety is the M1911 design and some of its descendants. From the time of the so-called Series 80 firing pin block, the necessity of an external manual safety to contain the risk of a trigger momentum/sear bounce discharge ceased to exist. (The Series 80 firing pin safety also addressed the risk, whether real or only theoretical, of a firing pin momentum or firing pin bounce discharge caused by dropping the pistol on the muzzle or the rear of the frame, respectively.) The Schwartz safety, which performs the same function and differs only in the mode of release (grip safety movement vs. trigger movement) does the same thing.
By definition, and even if they did not also include some form of the Series 80 firing pin safety, DA/SA pistols with the hammer down (as well as DAO pistols) do not pose the same risk as the M1911 design. The mainspring is not compressed, and the concept of sear engagement (which in fact does not exist in the case of a hammer down condition) is not relied upon to contain firing mechanism force. In short, in a DA/SA pistol (or a DAO pistol), an external manual safety is entirely vestigial, offering zero incremental "safety."
OK, some might say, but even if it adds nothing, including an external manual safety can't hurt, right? So why not do it?
Because it CAN hurt. One obvious way is that adding and employing an external manual safety imposes one or more additional steps that must be taken before a self-defense pistol can begin providing self-defense. If an IDPA competitor forgets to release the safety, he loses points. If a terrified victim of life-threatening assault is too rattled to remember to release the safety, he loses potentially a good deal more.
Moreover, if you know something about how the car works, you also know that one of the problems with safeties is that they have been known to cause unintended discharges when they are released, a phenomenon that has been documented from time to time for decades. Take a look, for instance, at how the safety in a Mauser 98 (or '03 Springfield) works. In fact, the only truly safe way to release a manual safety requires that the mainspring be first uncocked, which with most pistol designs is impossible.
And then there is the problem, which shouldn't exist but does, that external manual safeties tend to cause some pistol carriers to treat the gun as so "safe" when engaged that they disregard some of the real fundamentals of firearms safety, such as muzzle control. Given the issue that prompted this post, I'd put your friend squarely in this category.
So, if you asked me, I'd say that if your friend wanted to acquire an SA pistol with an external manual safety, and then to acquire sufficient knowledge about how such a pistol works and should be handled, fine. Or, if he wanted to acquire a DA/SA pistol after acquiring sufficient knowledge about how such a pistol works to realize that an external manual safety is neither required nor desirable, I'd also say fine. But if he wishes to insist upon acquiring a DA/SA pistol that includes an external manual safety, I'd say he should take up golf. Fewer bystanders will be at risk.
When I was younger, it was accepted that one could not really learn how to drive a motor vehicle unless he had at least some understanding of how they work. I admit that in today's instant gratification society the wisdom of this precept seems to have been lost -- which may be the best argument to date in favor of self-driving cars. Unfortunately, though, the same admonition applies to firearms: you will have grave difficulty learning to handle them safely unless you understand how they work.
The external manual safety is thought to exist to reduce the risk of an unintended discharge attributable to sufficient wayward trigger finger action as to cause the gun to fire. Perhaps they do reduce that risk, but that is not why they exist. Rather, an external manual safety exists because of two precepts that define single action firearms. No. 1: the hammer and mainspring are cocked. No. 2: the amount of sear engagement (which is what prevents that cocked hammer/mainspring firing force from being released) is necessarily small. The concern is that if such a firearm is dropped, trigger momentum or sear momentum (or what is sometimes referred to as "sear bounce") could cause the sear engagement to become disengaged, causing the hammer to fall and the firearm to discharge.
Emblematic of the external manual safety is the M1911 design and some of its descendants. From the time of the so-called Series 80 firing pin block, the necessity of an external manual safety to contain the risk of a trigger momentum/sear bounce discharge ceased to exist. (The Series 80 firing pin safety also addressed the risk, whether real or only theoretical, of a firing pin momentum or firing pin bounce discharge caused by dropping the pistol on the muzzle or the rear of the frame, respectively.) The Schwartz safety, which performs the same function and differs only in the mode of release (grip safety movement vs. trigger movement) does the same thing.
By definition, and even if they did not also include some form of the Series 80 firing pin safety, DA/SA pistols with the hammer down (as well as DAO pistols) do not pose the same risk as the M1911 design. The mainspring is not compressed, and the concept of sear engagement (which in fact does not exist in the case of a hammer down condition) is not relied upon to contain firing mechanism force. In short, in a DA/SA pistol (or a DAO pistol), an external manual safety is entirely vestigial, offering zero incremental "safety."
OK, some might say, but even if it adds nothing, including an external manual safety can't hurt, right? So why not do it?
Because it CAN hurt. One obvious way is that adding and employing an external manual safety imposes one or more additional steps that must be taken before a self-defense pistol can begin providing self-defense. If an IDPA competitor forgets to release the safety, he loses points. If a terrified victim of life-threatening assault is too rattled to remember to release the safety, he loses potentially a good deal more.
Moreover, if you know something about how the car works, you also know that one of the problems with safeties is that they have been known to cause unintended discharges when they are released, a phenomenon that has been documented from time to time for decades. Take a look, for instance, at how the safety in a Mauser 98 (or '03 Springfield) works. In fact, the only truly safe way to release a manual safety requires that the mainspring be first uncocked, which with most pistol designs is impossible.
And then there is the problem, which shouldn't exist but does, that external manual safeties tend to cause some pistol carriers to treat the gun as so "safe" when engaged that they disregard some of the real fundamentals of firearms safety, such as muzzle control. Given the issue that prompted this post, I'd put your friend squarely in this category.
So, if you asked me, I'd say that if your friend wanted to acquire an SA pistol with an external manual safety, and then to acquire sufficient knowledge about how such a pistol works and should be handled, fine. Or, if he wanted to acquire a DA/SA pistol after acquiring sufficient knowledge about how such a pistol works to realize that an external manual safety is neither required nor desirable, I'd also say fine. But if he wishes to insist upon acquiring a DA/SA pistol that includes an external manual safety, I'd say he should take up golf. Fewer bystanders will be at risk.
Your post had a lot of good info/points. I'd love it more if there weren't as many assumptions and judgements made in it.
I stated in my original post that I didn't want this thread to devolve into philosophy of the merits of a safety. As a result, I won't get into details about my friend or his rationale.
Thanks to the rest of you who had suggestions. I'm working on getting him to go with the Sig P series. I have the 226 and carry it in the winter; I love it. I'm trying to get him to go with a 229.
But it for now he has a ton of great suggestions from this thread for guns that meet the criteria he's looking for. Wicked helpful info folks. Thanks! Keep the suggestions coming if you have any more!
slap shot
NES Member
Glockster30
NES Member
The P229 will work in the cooler weather even though it is heavy, but it's going to be hell trying to conceal it in warm weather.
