Are Pistol Safeties Necessary? (Archieve)
Pistol Safeties: Needed or Optional?
Pistol safeties are common on most modern pistols. The question we bring to the community is: Are pistol safeties a necessity?
This question is a bit misleading to begin with because most things in life are subjective.
However, we like to take a deeper dive into things and see if commonality is truly the best way to have them.
Will you gain any benefit by having a safety-less pistol?
There are many types of safety devices. The most prevalent is a manual thumb safety. Others include, but aren't limited to, internal, grip, trigger, and passive.
Knowing what these are is important, but we're more going to focus on whether they benefit the end user.
Instead of diving into each type of safety and asking the pros and cons, it is best to take a step back and see what action it is being used on. There are many types of pistol action that sometimes by the manual of arms require a type of safety to be present to quite genuinely use it safely.
Let us start with the most common, the striker fired. Often these types of pistols are split down the middle either having or lacking a manual thumb safety.
The main reason for this is due to the fact that the pistol is able to utilize other types of safeties. While a manual safety isn't necessary if you don't have one it's necessary to have another type to supplement its place.
Single action is fairly similar in performance to striker-fired however suffer from the fact that they usually have lighter triggers and exposed hammers. This is why most SA pistols have manual safeties in conjunction with other types as well.
DA/SA is the oddball, due to its manual of arms it doesn't need a manual safety like a striker-fired, while also having the performance of a SA light trigger on all subsequent shots after your first. Some may argue that the training required to effectively use the double action trigger is more obtrusive than swiping a manual safety off.
Safety and accessibility aren't discussed thoroughly when this topic is brought up. Here at Purposeful Armament, we are advocates of having proper holsters and carrying on body.
However, we understand that there are some scenarios people encounter where they may leave their firearm in their car or home without a holster.
This is a scenario we don't like talking about because every firearm should have some sort of retention on or off body, however, the issue remains... what if you don't have a holster for your firearm?
Let's propose a scenario, you have a pistol that is single-action and you have no holster. Is it safe to leave it in your car tucked in between your floormat and center console?
Will the rubbing of the floor mat undo the safety while something brushes up against the trigger? You may say "Store it safety on and at half-cock, thus requiring an extra step to use the firearm if need be, taking off the safety then cocking the hammer manually with your hand or by racking the slide.
How about we talk about what's actually important, safety when carrying. What I think about every time I holster is how many steps would be necessary for this firearm to discharge and injure me?
The next step I take when thinking about that is acquiring a pistol that has the most steps that prevent me from injuring myself while simultaneously not impeding my ability to use that firearm quickly.
Some variables that may impede your ability to swipe a manual safety or engage the grip safety entirely include using gloves, temperature, dirty/greasy hands, stress, sweat, etc.
