DA/SA pistols carry questions
- Thread starter Skarekrow88
- Start date
Carl the Floor Walker
Moderator
I find them amusing as well. I also am interested in what circle you are in Jake?
wild cat mccane
New member
humm...okay.
Good question though on the decocker. If you get an translucent or video of different gun actions, you can see decockers are not created or do the same thing.
I personally do not like the CZ decocker. It's a hammer on an inertia pin, the hammer should drop to the firing pin block requiring a full DA pull. Mechanically, if it happens or not isn't all that important, the CZ design leaves the hammer in an odd spot for me.
I can get pretty argumentative. If someone challenged me on the CZ decocker being totally safe, I probably wouldn't fight it one more post.
Meh.
Good question though on the decocker. If you get an translucent or video of different gun actions, you can see decockers are not created or do the same thing.
I personally do not like the CZ decocker. It's a hammer on an inertia pin, the hammer should drop to the firing pin block requiring a full DA pull. Mechanically, if it happens or not isn't all that important, the CZ design leaves the hammer in an odd spot for me.
I can get pretty argumentative. If someone challenged me on the CZ decocker being totally safe, I probably wouldn't fight it one more post.
Meh.
If the CZ bothers you, Walthers will probably scare you to death! 
A friend of mine got a Walther PP Super Ultra, 9x18 Ultra. This was a commercial gun imported for sale, not a police trade in. He had the gun for several years and then discovered a serious problem.
My friend has rather small hands, and could not easily reach the safety to decock the gun with the pistol in the usual upright shooting grip. SO, what he would do is lay the gun on its side, which allowed him to reach the lever. He did that for several years, no issues.
THEN, one time he was out shooting with a friend, who asked to try the gun. This fellow was larger with larger hands, and when he applied the safety to decock the gun with the gun held upright in the usual way, THE GUN FIRED!!!
They tried it one more time, and the result was the same, with the gun held normally, decocking it FIRED the gun!!!
They took it to the gunsmith, he was astounded. There were broken parts, which, if the gun was held sideways, lined up and worked properly, but with the gun held upright, did not, and allowed the gun to fire when the safety was put on!!
I mention this, not as a bash against Walther, but just to illustrate the fact that the most unthinkable things ARE POSSIBLE, even if extremely rare, and that ANY system CAN fail. They rarely do, but they can. Never put 100% trust in any mechanical safety system!
Proper safe gunhandling (particularly muzzle control) ALWAYS, ALWAYS MATTERS.
Some designs drop the hammer down to a safety notch and it never hits the firing pin. Other systems lock the firing pin and let the hammer hit it. And there is at least one system that places a block between the hammer and the pin and lets the hammer hit that.
No matter what the design is, ALWAYS point the gun in a safe direction when decocking. ALWAYS!!!
A friend of mine got a Walther PP Super Ultra, 9x18 Ultra. This was a commercial gun imported for sale, not a police trade in. He had the gun for several years and then discovered a serious problem.
My friend has rather small hands, and could not easily reach the safety to decock the gun with the pistol in the usual upright shooting grip. SO, what he would do is lay the gun on its side, which allowed him to reach the lever. He did that for several years, no issues.
THEN, one time he was out shooting with a friend, who asked to try the gun. This fellow was larger with larger hands, and when he applied the safety to decock the gun with the gun held upright in the usual way, THE GUN FIRED!!!
They tried it one more time, and the result was the same, with the gun held normally, decocking it FIRED the gun!!!
They took it to the gunsmith, he was astounded. There were broken parts, which, if the gun was held sideways, lined up and worked properly, but with the gun held upright, did not, and allowed the gun to fire when the safety was put on!!
I mention this, not as a bash against Walther, but just to illustrate the fact that the most unthinkable things ARE POSSIBLE, even if extremely rare, and that ANY system CAN fail. They rarely do, but they can. Never put 100% trust in any mechanical safety system!
Proper safe gunhandling (particularly muzzle control) ALWAYS, ALWAYS MATTERS.
Some designs drop the hammer down to a safety notch and it never hits the firing pin. Other systems lock the firing pin and let the hammer hit it. And there is at least one system that places a block between the hammer and the pin and lets the hammer hit that.
No matter what the design is, ALWAYS point the gun in a safe direction when decocking. ALWAYS!!!
Jim Watson
New member
And we are warned not to depend on the P38 hammer drop; it drops the hammer full force on the firing pin and depends on a lug on the firing pin against a shoulder in the safety to hold it back. Wear and undependable Untermenschen labor produced some that would not hold. The predecessor, the HP, retracted the firing pin and dropped the hammer against the safety, safer, but variously reported as more expensive and too safe.
Too safe - some of those Walther developmental guns failed safe, that is if anything went wrong, they would not fire at all. The General Staff required that their weapons be capable of being fired, and if the safety wasn't as safe, well, just be careful.
Too safe - some of those Walther developmental guns failed safe, that is if anything went wrong, they would not fire at all. The General Staff required that their weapons be capable of being fired, and if the safety wasn't as safe, well, just be careful.
wild cat mccane
New member
The Walther decocker is the best decocker in my mind. On the current handgun, P99.
You're talking about a gun that was made in 1945
CZ suffers the same problem. Old design but it is carried forward.
You're talking about a gun that was made in 1945
CZ suffers the same problem. Old design but it is carried forward.
I'm not. The gun my friend had was a Walther PP Super Ultra. Commercial made in the mid-late 70s. NOT a WW II gun or a police contract gun. He told me he got the gun in the early 80s, wasn't sure of the year but was sure of the year when he discovered the failure which was late in 88.
No one knows when the gun broke, it might have been broken when he got it, or it could have broken years later right before he handed it to his friend who discovered it fired when the safety was put on. No way to know. Because of the unusual way my friend handled it when applying the safety, HE never had a problem, and finding the gun broken and defective like that after he carried it daily for several years frightened him more than a bit. It would me, too!
Point here is that a "new" gun broke. and broke in such a BIZZARE way that the safety worked PART of the time and failed the rest of the time. Fortunately no one was hurt and no property damaged, but short of that. he kind of won the "bad luck" lottery.
Really, really rare, "one in a million" and "lighting strike" kind of odds but it DID happen, and since it has once, it can, again.
Again, no bash on Walther, or any other maker of any other design, or even lowering the hammer by hand, the point is, that it is ALWAYS at least remotely POSSIBLE that something could go wrong and the gun fire.
So use the only real safety, the one between your ears (which also fails, sometimes
) and keep the pistol in a safe direction in case the worst happens.