Here's an interesting quote from WWII close combat gurus William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes, of Shanghai police and fighting knife fame, in their book "Shooting to Live with the One-hand Gun":
We have an inveterate dislike of the profusion of safety devices with which all automatic pistols are regularly equipped. We believe them to be the cause of more accidents than anything else. There are too many instances of men being shot by accident either because the safety catch was in the firing position when it ought not to have been or because it was in the safe position when that was the last thing to be desired. It is better, we think, to make the pistol permanently "unsafe" and then to devise such methods of handling that there will be no accidents... Our unorthodox methods have been subjected to the acid test of many years of particularly exacting conditions and have not been found wanting.
End quote.
Interesting, eh? I wonder if Gaston Glock read "Shooting to Live" before designing his first pistol.
Of course, that was over fifty years ago; times have changed, and a couple of old British guys couldn't possibly know as much about handgun safety as Bill Clinton and his trial lawyer buddies.
We have an inveterate dislike of the profusion of safety devices with which all automatic pistols are regularly equipped. We believe them to be the cause of more accidents than anything else. There are too many instances of men being shot by accident either because the safety catch was in the firing position when it ought not to have been or because it was in the safe position when that was the last thing to be desired. It is better, we think, to make the pistol permanently "unsafe" and then to devise such methods of handling that there will be no accidents... Our unorthodox methods have been subjected to the acid test of many years of particularly exacting conditions and have not been found wanting.
End quote.
Interesting, eh? I wonder if Gaston Glock read "Shooting to Live" before designing his first pistol.
Of course, that was over fifty years ago; times have changed, and a couple of old British guys couldn't possibly know as much about handgun safety as Bill Clinton and his trial lawyer buddies.