…And it is correct that different folks have differently shaped hands. My dad's palm makes a gap that won't depress a 1911 grip safety, so he has to lock his out or use one with a raised surface. My hand has no issue with it.
Much of this thread has described the Thumbs Forward grip as if it weren't compatible with the 1911 thumb safety, but
NRA's Shooting Illustrated description of it is for a 1911. So it sounds like the OP's Thumb's Forward grip includes a constraint perhaps not originally included in the concept. That happens a lot. At the Shooter's Forum one of the posting members shot with Cooper and Jack Weaver and his son, among others, in the old South Western Combat Pistol League that led to the founding of IPSC and Gunsite. So this fellow posts a photo of his Weaver grip, and sure enough someone says it's all wrong. When the SWCPL fellow cites his credentials, the critic posts that he has IPSC training. OK. So we had a case of the upstart Young Turk presuming to tell the old masters they didn't know how to use their own system. Sort of humorous, but the bottom line was the critic had been taught a variant of the Weaver that his teacher liked better and decided that meant it must be The Right Way to do it. Hmmm. Remember the differences in hands thing?
The Gunsite Smithy long ago devised and recommended a
lowered paddle on the thumb safety. That may prevent the OP's "thumbs forward" grip from causing it to be raised on his wide mag well Para Ordnance. No way to guess without seeing photos of his grip on that gun and how it may have pushed the safety up. I like and use the lowered safety, but, again, everything depends on your hands and, in this case, probably the gun frame.
Regarding choice of weapons, you try out different platforms and find what works for you. The English have the right idea with the shotgun try-stock, but with handguns the grip frame limits grip panel flexibility, so you have to try different guns. You might find you even like more than one. I trained on 1911's and know how to fit them up and like them partly as a shooter and partly as that guy in the neighborhood who also has a lathe in his garage and is a tinkerer who likes greasy metal. That doesn't mean the next guy should take that same path. It's just a fact about me, not an advertisement for the weapon system for all possible people in all possible circumstances. I will say I've twice run over 3,000 rounds of dirty shooting conventionally lubricated cast bullet loads through my beater SA 1911 over four consecutive days without cleaning and before Bullseye (first time) or Universal (second time) and lube residue built up enough to cause a failure of the slide to go the last eighth of an inch into battery. That's reliable enough for me. And no, I've never done anything to its feed ramp.
Having watched the safety argument play out on another board, I don't think there's any winning it one way or the other. Does a safety make a gun harder to discharge and require extra coordination on the part of the shooter to operate it? Yes. That's what it's there for. Safetyless gun designs make it easier for either the owner or someone who shouldn't have their hands on them to discharge them, be the latter a bad guy or a small child. Yeah, yeah, I know, you're not supposed to let either one of those get their hands on your weapon. Coulda', woulda', shoulda' probably plays through everyone's mind when they hear of a child getting hold of and discharging a weapon, yet it still happens. Libertarian David Bergland once observed that Utopia is a place where nothing ever goes wrong, pointing out afterward that "Eutopia is not one of the options". The conflict between ease of fast use and safety is a balancing act. This is true of safety mechanisms on the gun and those outside it, such as gun safes or external safety locks. Nobody is ever going to have The Right Answer until a gun can read the operator's mind.
