The article outlined other accidental discharges besides the one with the wife and in any event the story is suspicious.
That event is given as the principal motivation for the switch.
That one example is bad and there are other examples sited.
One officer left his pistol within access of his 4 year old son who then shot himself. Another officer shot himself in the leg. And lastly another officer had a discharge in his barracks. These are all examples of breaking the fundamental rules of gun safety, which you yourself say should be easy:
How many of the Cub Scouts would point the Glock at someone during the pull the trigger phase of disassembly? None and thats because its simple common sense not to point the pistol at someone. In fact, I bet most people would take it a step further and have a dedicated tub of sand for this exercise or do it outside pointed to the ground out of fear an accidental discharge might damage the house.
First off, I disagree with your above assertion. I've taken four pistol cases at SIG Sauer Academy. This doesn't make me special, it just means I've been in courses with both regular civilians and officers with varying degrees of experience. This includes men and women just entering their police academies to those with 30 years on the force. I've seen people inadvertently muzzle themselves numerous times. Once was two officers in their 50s who themselves were instructors for their department. Sitting in a vehicle and drawing their pistols while seated they both muzzled their own legs getting the pistols into action. These were good shooters. If you asked them they knew the basic tenets easily. But they weren't paying attention or had become complacent during the drills. Even seasoned people can make mistakes as you keep repeating, and that's true when it comes to gun safety.
I have a difficult time imagining that the Pennsylvania State Police doesn't have a very good firearms training program. Just because a cop does something foolish with a gun doesn't mean he wasn't properly trained. It just means he disregarded what he was taught.
Having taken courses side by side with police officers, I've talked with them about this. Besides the initial training they receive at the academy and the ammunition they are budget for annual qualification, without an exception every single officer I talked to was paying for that course and the ammo for that course out of his pocket. The police departments in many areas don't have the budget for periodic training; it's often a once and done thing. I've seen officers make mistakes in courses, I've also seen a local officer at the range (an excellent shot btw) take a loaded pistol off the bench, move it the rear for packing, and in the process muzzle his own wife in the abdomen. This man was in his 40s, not a kid. As Ibmikey pointed out, continual training or at least continual reinforcement of safety practices is what's important, and a lot of departments don't do that.
The Troopers could practice and train weekly, but when a person is exhausted from driving all day or from working the grave yard shift no amount of training will stop mistakes.
This is to me a cop out. I get tired too. I've also had a negligent discharge. It was a learning experience to say the least, and it happened with a DA/SA pistol. Because I was maintaining muzzle discipline and I knew my backstop, no one was hurt. Negligent discharges can and do happen, but as has been pointed out numerous times in this thread that's why we have more than one rule of gun safety. Additionally, training helps mitigate this. We have millions of people in this country using similar style pistols. Yes negligent discharge related deaths happen. But they're no where near a plague. I'll also point out that as someone who had a ND, a "safer" trigger system such as DA/SA did nothing for me. I thought the pistol was unloaded. I didn't check. That incident was entirely on my own lack of adherence to check that pistol. The manual of arms did nothing to stop user error.
It's been my experience that in the vast majority of these incidents people fail to check the status of the pistol and the manual of arms wouldn't have stopped the incident from happening.
It just has to be acknowledged. The procedure for disassembly requires you to break one of the rules of safe gun handling. This is simply not a good design choice.
As I stated, I also think other designs that don't require a trigger pull to disassemble to have an advantage there. That said, I don't consider simply pulling a trigger to be breaking one of the four major rules. "Keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to fire." I do dry fire practice almost every day. When I do it, I drop the magazine, check the chamber, repeat the previous step, point it in a direction where I know there aren't people and where I know my backstop would stop a discharge, and begin practice. Triggers can be pressed without resulting in injury or even the discharge of a round.
