My greatest objection is what is yet to come. Law makers criminalising the locks non use. I can see all sorts of nightmare scenerios where innocent gun owners are criminally charged because their guns wern't locked and were either stolen and used in a crime, or misused by someone else. I guarantee there are venomously anti gun attorneys just chomping at the bit.
Removing the lock on a 642!
- Thread starter tahitian.tedgrace
- Start date
A small child is even less likely to defeat a safe, but that's not very convenient to carry around with you should you need to secure your gun in a car, hotel room, or the bedside drawer of your grandmother's house. The ILS key, on the other hand, can be carried on your key ring very easily.
Look, there are lots of ways that you can secure and/or make a handgun inoperable. I'm not trying to debate which is most effective. What I'm pointing out is that there are some legitimate uses for the ILS. You or I may never use the feature, but some people do.
Apparently you've been driving older cars. Many new cars have door locks which automatically engage when the transmission is shifted into gear or the vehicle is driven over a certain speed and some even have locks which automatically engage after the car sits for a certain period of time without any doors being opened. Unlike the S&W ILS, however, those features are designed to engage themselves without any action from the driver. My S&W revolvers, however, will remain unlocked unless I choose to lock them just like the doors on my older cars and my home.
Actually I put "real" locks on my house, i.e. sidebar schlage because I realize how crappy a home depot grade lock set is in terms of direct forced entry or picking.
How small of a child can disable a IL Smith? I don't know, but I don't think responsible gun safety at home should be predicated on more than just the thought that your kid can't figure a way to turn that little nubin. Promoting that as "safe" is unsafe in my opinion.
Furthermore, and again why saddle everyone with that... if it is something you want, great, not everyone does. Time to stop the group think, one solution for everyone stuff in this county and let people make choices and take responsibility for what follows.
Furthermore I find it really funny whenever people argue pro-lock to imagine what this conversation would look like in say 1982 when what 85% of American law enforcement had Smith revolvers in their holsters. I know tons of guy from this era who to this DAY will not carry a semi-auto anything, 6 for sure in their mind trumps anything anyone can say about anything OTHER than a revolver. I have a have a world of respect for these guys and can jsut immagine telling them guys you want to add some useless or seldom used bits to their gun that might lock the action. This would have never flown back than, so why is the safety and reliability of a gun I might buy any less important?
How small of a child can disable a IL Smith? I don't know, but I don't think responsible gun safety at home should be predicated on more than just the thought that your kid can't figure a way to turn that little nubin. Promoting that as "safe" is unsafe in my opinion.
Furthermore, and again why saddle everyone with that... if it is something you want, great, not everyone does. Time to stop the group think, one solution for everyone stuff in this county and let people make choices and take responsibility for what follows.
Furthermore I find it really funny whenever people argue pro-lock to imagine what this conversation would look like in say 1982 when what 85% of American law enforcement had Smith revolvers in their holsters. I know tons of guy from this era who to this DAY will not carry a semi-auto anything, 6 for sure in their mind trumps anything anyone can say about anything OTHER than a revolver. I have a have a world of respect for these guys and can jsut immagine telling them guys you want to add some useless or seldom used bits to their gun that might lock the action. This would have never flown back than, so why is the safety and reliability of a gun I might buy any less important?
Well, a child (or anyone else) can't turn the "little nubin" unless they either posess the key or disassemble the revolver. Since very few small children would know how to detail strip a S&W revolver, keeping the key away from them would pretty much guarantee that they can't turn the "little nubin". Also, I don't see how using the ILS is any less safe than hiding an unlocked revolver in a sock drawer or on the top shelf of the closet as many people do. A dedicated gun safe is probably the best security, but carrying a safe around with you to be used in a car, hotel room, or relative's house isn't something that most people are going to do. Putting the ILS key on your key ring, however, is very unobtrusive and it would be difficult to rationalize a good reason not to do it.
Because it's more expensive to run two separate production lines for ILS and non-ILS revolvers concurrently. Enough people already complain about the prices of new S&W revolvers (though when adjusted for inflation they're really no more expensive than they've ever been), so I can already see the whining and moaning about having to pay extra to get a gun without the lock. S&W probably already figures, as I do, that those who want the lock can use it while those who don't can ignore it easily enough. Probably also playing into it is that, outside of internet fora, I've never heard that much complaining so I think the whole thing is probably a tempest in a teapot anyway.
You know, it's also funny that I see so many comments about the S&W lock being group think, appeasment of the anti's, an extension of the nanny state, the decay of western civilization, etc. but the people who foam at the mouth about the S&W lock seem to be by and large silent about the Taurus and Ruger ILS. Of course, those systems aren't as obvious so it's probably just a case of out-of-sight, out-of-mind.
It would probably look about like the people who whined and moaned in 1982 when the pinned barrels and recessed cylinders were dropped, or in the 60's when the fourth and fifth screws were eliminated, or in the 40's when the long action was discontinued. Revolver shooters can be a reactionary bunch sometimes and many of us just don't like anything different.
The fact of the matter is that safety and reliability has not been significantly compromised by the addition of the ILS. You can thump on the "one more thing to go wrong" drum all you like, but it cannot be denied that no man-made device can be guaranteed never to give its user trouble. S&W (and every other gun maker for that matter) occasionally had problems before the lock was introduced and I've seen no evidence that their rate of breakage/malfunction is enough higher since the introduction of the ILS to be statistically significant. With any firearm, revolver or semi-auto and lock or no-lock, you pay your money and take your chances. I've yet to see anything to convince me that the chance of having problems with an ILS S&W is different enough from those of a non-ILS S&W that I should be concerned about it.
If you don't like ILS S&W's because of looks, politics, general principle, or whatever else, that's fine; you buy what you like and I'll buy what I like. Please don't try to tell me, however, that the standards of safety and reliability have been abandoned with ILS revolvers because that simply is not the case.
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Webley, I won't buy a Taurus - too many friends have had too many lemons - and I was not aware of the ILS on the LCR when I bought it. (I no longer have the LCR).
I do not believe my old GP100 had the lock. I traded the GP100 for a Colt 1917 that definitely does not have a lock.
My new S&W handguns, 442 and M&P auto, were specifically purchased as no-lock variants.
I do not believe my old GP100 had the lock. I traded the GP100 for a Colt 1917 that definitely does not have a lock.
My new S&W handguns, 442 and M&P auto, were specifically purchased as no-lock variants.
Originally posted by dahermit
So again, we're back to looks. As I said before, if you don't like the lock because of looks, that's fine and I won't argue the point. However, I do notice that there are a lot more people complaining about the S&W lock for reasons other than looks than there are about the Taurus and Ruger locks for any reason at all. Like I sad before, out-of-sight out-of-mind.
Originally posted by MLeake
The Rugers with come equipped with the lock include the LCR and sinlge-actions like the Blackhawk and Vaquero (I don't know if the Single Six or Bearcat have them). To my knowledge, the GP100, SP101, Redhawk, and Super Redhawk are not currently offered with locks (though I wouldn't be surprised if that feature was incorporated into them in the future). There are also some Ruger semi-autos with locks including the P345 and, IIRC, the SR9/40.
So again, we're back to looks. As I said before, if you don't like the lock because of looks, that's fine and I won't argue the point. However, I do notice that there are a lot more people complaining about the S&W lock for reasons other than looks than there are about the Taurus and Ruger locks for any reason at all. Like I sad before, out-of-sight out-of-mind.
Originally posted by MLeake
The Rugers with come equipped with the lock include the LCR and sinlge-actions like the Blackhawk and Vaquero (I don't know if the Single Six or Bearcat have them). To my knowledge, the GP100, SP101, Redhawk, and Super Redhawk are not currently offered with locks (though I wouldn't be surprised if that feature was incorporated into them in the future). There are also some Ruger semi-autos with locks including the P345 and, IIRC, the SR9/40.
Webley ---
You state: "The fact of the matter is that safety and reliability has not been significantly compromised by the addition of the ILS" and "I've seen no evidence that their rate of breakage/malfunction is enough higher since the introduction of the ILS to be statistically significant".
So let’s start with statistics, what are you sources for what guns pre-and post lock. You are presenting arguments as if you have hard, data on this matter and if you do I personally would be interested in seeing it. If you don't have some hard numbers it's fine, lets just not act as if we do have that data.
Next what do you call significant? When we speak of such things it is usually relative to the situation and device in question. A failed transmission in a car is a warranty headache, a failed helicopter transmission has a body count much of the time. Given that many people use a gun for self defense this would make most want to minimize the chance of mechanical failure.
I will grant you that the smith ILS has a "low" chance of failing. Is it 0.1%, 0.01% or .00001%? I do not know, and neither I suspect do you. However the fact is however low the chance is the lock can not fail if it is not there. FURTHERMORE in medicine, aerospace and other fields we routinely invest massive sums of money in engineering, equipment and materials to reduce or eliminate failure modes that are as small a percentage as the ILS number is likely to be. Therefore I personally do not think it is unreasonable that some people, myself included consider this significant and seek to eliminate the ILS from our guns either by not purchasing or disabling it.
If you do not consider the number significant, I certainly am not going to try and convince you otherwise however I would hope that you can see the other side of the argument for those who do consider the lock to be an issue.
In addition please realize that many of us have had to turn many fasteners we do not have a bit or fitting for or defeat locks for which the key is lost or gone. Spend enough time doing this and you look at anything pretending to be a lock a lot differently from say a decent pad lock, door lock, safe etc. The ILS is definitely a pretend lock much the same way luggage and brief case locks are pretend locks, yes the will slow someone down but not by much and the false sense of security especially when it comes to a gun may be a very bad side effect.
You state: "The fact of the matter is that safety and reliability has not been significantly compromised by the addition of the ILS" and "I've seen no evidence that their rate of breakage/malfunction is enough higher since the introduction of the ILS to be statistically significant".
So let’s start with statistics, what are you sources for what guns pre-and post lock. You are presenting arguments as if you have hard, data on this matter and if you do I personally would be interested in seeing it. If you don't have some hard numbers it's fine, lets just not act as if we do have that data.
Next what do you call significant? When we speak of such things it is usually relative to the situation and device in question. A failed transmission in a car is a warranty headache, a failed helicopter transmission has a body count much of the time. Given that many people use a gun for self defense this would make most want to minimize the chance of mechanical failure.
I will grant you that the smith ILS has a "low" chance of failing. Is it 0.1%, 0.01% or .00001%? I do not know, and neither I suspect do you. However the fact is however low the chance is the lock can not fail if it is not there. FURTHERMORE in medicine, aerospace and other fields we routinely invest massive sums of money in engineering, equipment and materials to reduce or eliminate failure modes that are as small a percentage as the ILS number is likely to be. Therefore I personally do not think it is unreasonable that some people, myself included consider this significant and seek to eliminate the ILS from our guns either by not purchasing or disabling it.
If you do not consider the number significant, I certainly am not going to try and convince you otherwise however I would hope that you can see the other side of the argument for those who do consider the lock to be an issue.
In addition please realize that many of us have had to turn many fasteners we do not have a bit or fitting for or defeat locks for which the key is lost or gone. Spend enough time doing this and you look at anything pretending to be a lock a lot differently from say a decent pad lock, door lock, safe etc. The ILS is definitely a pretend lock much the same way luggage and brief case locks are pretend locks, yes the will slow someone down but not by much and the false sense of security especially when it comes to a gun may be a very bad side effect.
Well, there have only been two documented and verifiable incidents of the ILS "auto locking" that I'm aware of, one reported by Michael Bane and the other reported by Massad Ayoob. That is not to say that it hasn't happened more, but all the other reports I've seen are anonymous posts on internet fora which, as I mentioned before, are unreliable. There are several reasons that internet posts are unreliable. Most obviously, the honesty of the poster is unverifiable and thus a reported "auto lock" could be nothing more than someone with an axe to grind or simply someone who likes to stir the pot. Secondly, the poster's expertise in diagnosing the problem is often unknown so a revolver that actually locked up for some other reason might have its issues mistakenly blamed on the ILS. Finally, a poster may post his experience on multiple fora under multiple handles thus making one incident appear to be many. Likewise, if more than one person was present when the incident occurred, you may have multiple people posting about what is, in fact, one incident and thereby also making one incident seem like many.
Now, from 2001 (the year that the lock was introduced) until 2010 (2011 and 2012 figures aren't available yet) S&W has produced 1,554,248 revolvers according to the ATF's statistics. If we only take the two documented cases, that's a failure rate of approximately 0.000129%. Even if we're extremely generous and assume a failure rate of 100 per year (which I very highly doubt), that gives us a total failure rate of only 0.0643%. If we take it even a step further and assume the ridiculously high failure rate of 1,000 per year, we're still only at 0.643%. In order to get a 1% failure rate, we would have to have an average of just over 1,554 "auto locks" per year.
So, even if we have a failure rate of 0.643%, that would still be a grand total of 10,000 "auto locks" over a ten year period and I'd think that we'd have more than two documented, verifiable incidents particularly since so many people want so badly to prove that the lock is the horrible, awful thing that they claim it is. Of course, if you know of documented cases that I don't, please share them.
I can't speak for aircraft, but medical equipment often has a much higher failure rate than you're giving it credit for. For example, my father works in a 200-bed hospital which has a 10% ventilator-to-bed ratio. I asked him if 1 ventilator per year failing (which would be a 5% failure rate) is excessive and he informed me that actually, in his experience, the failure rate is typically much higher. It is for this reason that ventilators have multiple alarms and per policy are checked at least every two hours and that the vital components of the ventilators are proactively replaced after a predetermined number of hours in use. Also, I have a very difficult time believing that a piece of medical equipment like a ventilator or an aircraft can be held to a higher standard of reliability than a revolver regardless of the money spent because a ventilator or airplane is an exponentially more complicated machine than any revolver ever produced.
If we are to hold firearms to the same standards that medical equipment is, then we should be inspecting them at least daily, if not multiple times per day and having a gunsmith replacing all the vital parts after a predetermined number of rounds whether they're causing problems or not. Fortunately, firearms generally do not require as intensive maintenance as medical equipment does because they are not nearly as complex.
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Just as there are many reasons why the number of failures of the I.L. system may be over-documented there are as many reasons that it may under-documented. Such as the owner's of such guns just do not bother to post about it, do not use the INTERNET, remove the lock without comment, sell the gun, etc., and there is no system for reporting/documenting I.L. malfunctions and keeping count of the failures.
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Webely ---
First off I have to say that personally, I believe there have been more than 2 documented cases of the ILS autolock phenomenon. Is it rampant? No I will grant you that but I do not discount the number of cases you do based on the assumption that people can not adequately diagnose their gun's failure or have an ax to grind. To be frank the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, however your blanket discounting of other reports makes it seem that you sir are the one with the ax to grind.
Second any real estimate of the frequency of autolock would have to be based on actual use of the gun, not production numbers. How many guns have the lock disabled? How many end up loaded and tossed in a night stand with no rounds fired. As I said prior no one knows, not you, not I and I admit that the number is small. You make sweeping generalizations and assumptions and generate a small number, if I wanted to I could make my own sweeping generalizations and assumptions and come up with a number that is small as well but perhaps several orders of magnatude larger than yours. It's called playing with statisicis and it's not going to generate meaningful numbers. I admit the number is small to truly know how small requires information neither of us have.
Third my point about medicine and aerospace engineering is not about a specific device, my point is about how we make choices in these fields with things that need to not fail or else there are grave consequences. In this arena if we can eliminate something that happens some small percentage of the time or make that percentage even smaller this is considered a very real benefit. I, and many others feel the same about our guns, if we can eliminate this small number form our guns why would we not? And eliminating it does not require some expensive metallurgy or exotic engineering, just eliminate something that is not needed or used. Or as others have pointed out design it so failure is less likely, or so that it fails - safe.
First off I have to say that personally, I believe there have been more than 2 documented cases of the ILS autolock phenomenon. Is it rampant? No I will grant you that but I do not discount the number of cases you do based on the assumption that people can not adequately diagnose their gun's failure or have an ax to grind. To be frank the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, however your blanket discounting of other reports makes it seem that you sir are the one with the ax to grind.
Second any real estimate of the frequency of autolock would have to be based on actual use of the gun, not production numbers. How many guns have the lock disabled? How many end up loaded and tossed in a night stand with no rounds fired. As I said prior no one knows, not you, not I and I admit that the number is small. You make sweeping generalizations and assumptions and generate a small number, if I wanted to I could make my own sweeping generalizations and assumptions and come up with a number that is small as well but perhaps several orders of magnatude larger than yours. It's called playing with statisicis and it's not going to generate meaningful numbers. I admit the number is small to truly know how small requires information neither of us have.
Third my point about medicine and aerospace engineering is not about a specific device, my point is about how we make choices in these fields with things that need to not fail or else there are grave consequences. In this arena if we can eliminate something that happens some small percentage of the time or make that percentage even smaller this is considered a very real benefit. I, and many others feel the same about our guns, if we can eliminate this small number form our guns why would we not? And eliminating it does not require some expensive metallurgy or exotic engineering, just eliminate something that is not needed or used. Or as others have pointed out design it so failure is less likely, or so that it fails - safe.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that the numbers in my previous post were off due to some problems with decimal points
. That post has been edited with correct calculations.
Originally posted by dahermit
That still does not change the fact that we'd have to have extremely high incidences of "auto lock" in order to bring the total failure rate up to a meaningful percentage. Even at a rate of 1,000 "auto locks" per year, we still wouldn't even have a 1% failure rate. Also, other issues such as the problems with lightweight magnums in K-Frames were relatively well-known before the advent of the internet and I don't see why "auto locks" would be any more prone to under-reporting than cracked forcing cones. Given that we live in the information age, I find it difficult to believe that we would be unable to find more than two documented cases out of 10,000 revolvers over a ten year period even if the issue were under-reported.
Originally posted by RsqVet
If there are more than two documented cases, why don't you share them with us? The two that I mentioned earlier are the only ones that I've been able to find in 5+ years of researching the subject, so if you've found something I haven't I'd be very interested to see it. Even so, I acknowledged that the two documented cases were probably not the only two cases in which it had happened, hence the reason I also ran numbers on intentionally high hypothetical estimates. If we assume a 0.01% failure rate with a documentation rate of only 10%, we should still have at least 15 documented cases over a 10 year period. I certainly haven't been able to find 15 documented cases, have you? Math is math and I fail to see how running the numbers can be construed as having an axe to grind.
What you're missing is that because of the very high number of revolvers we're talking about, uncontrolled variables such as disabled locks or unused guns still have relatively small effects on the final outcome. For the sake of argument, if we assume that 25% of all the revolvers S&W produced from 2001 to 2010 had zero chance of "auto lock" due to uncontrolled variables such as those you mentioned, that leaves us with a total count of 1,165,686 revolvers. If we assume the same rate of 1,000 "auto locks" per year, we still only have a total failure rate of 0.858%. Taking it a step further, if we assume that half of all the revolvers produced by S&W from 2001 to 2010 had zero chance of "auto lock" due to uncontrolled variables and thus reduce our total to 777,124 revolvers, a 1,000 gun per year "auto lock" rate would only get us a total failure rate of 1.29%. These are, of course, intentionally high hypothetical numbers. As you yourself admitted, "auto lock" is a rare phenomenon and I don't think that many people would consider 1,000 cases per year to be rare.
My point was that I think your estimates for the failure rates of medical equipment and aircraft are too low. Also, even if your estimates were accurate, the amount of attention and redundant procedures for medical equipment and aircraft is much higher than it is for firearms regardless of the presence of a lock. My example of ventilators was meant to illustrate what a poor comparison firearms are to medical equipment. If you have a specific example of medical equipment that has a failure rate as low as you suggest and is maintained to the same degree as most people do firearms, I'd be interested to hear about it.
. That post has been edited with correct calculations.Originally posted by dahermit
That still does not change the fact that we'd have to have extremely high incidences of "auto lock" in order to bring the total failure rate up to a meaningful percentage. Even at a rate of 1,000 "auto locks" per year, we still wouldn't even have a 1% failure rate. Also, other issues such as the problems with lightweight magnums in K-Frames were relatively well-known before the advent of the internet and I don't see why "auto locks" would be any more prone to under-reporting than cracked forcing cones. Given that we live in the information age, I find it difficult to believe that we would be unable to find more than two documented cases out of 10,000 revolvers over a ten year period even if the issue were under-reported.
Originally posted by RsqVet
If there are more than two documented cases, why don't you share them with us? The two that I mentioned earlier are the only ones that I've been able to find in 5+ years of researching the subject, so if you've found something I haven't I'd be very interested to see it. Even so, I acknowledged that the two documented cases were probably not the only two cases in which it had happened, hence the reason I also ran numbers on intentionally high hypothetical estimates. If we assume a 0.01% failure rate with a documentation rate of only 10%, we should still have at least 15 documented cases over a 10 year period. I certainly haven't been able to find 15 documented cases, have you? Math is math and I fail to see how running the numbers can be construed as having an axe to grind.
What you're missing is that because of the very high number of revolvers we're talking about, uncontrolled variables such as disabled locks or unused guns still have relatively small effects on the final outcome. For the sake of argument, if we assume that 25% of all the revolvers S&W produced from 2001 to 2010 had zero chance of "auto lock" due to uncontrolled variables such as those you mentioned, that leaves us with a total count of 1,165,686 revolvers. If we assume the same rate of 1,000 "auto locks" per year, we still only have a total failure rate of 0.858%. Taking it a step further, if we assume that half of all the revolvers produced by S&W from 2001 to 2010 had zero chance of "auto lock" due to uncontrolled variables and thus reduce our total to 777,124 revolvers, a 1,000 gun per year "auto lock" rate would only get us a total failure rate of 1.29%. These are, of course, intentionally high hypothetical numbers. As you yourself admitted, "auto lock" is a rare phenomenon and I don't think that many people would consider 1,000 cases per year to be rare.
My point was that I think your estimates for the failure rates of medical equipment and aircraft are too low. Also, even if your estimates were accurate, the amount of attention and redundant procedures for medical equipment and aircraft is much higher than it is for firearms regardless of the presence of a lock. My example of ventilators was meant to illustrate what a poor comparison firearms are to medical equipment. If you have a specific example of medical equipment that has a failure rate as low as you suggest and is maintained to the same degree as most people do firearms, I'd be interested to hear about it.
Originally posted by dahermit
This is a classic example of reductio ad absurdum. By the same line of logic, we should ditch all our S&W's for Rugers because Rugers have ejector rods that cannot back out. The point is not that it is impossible for the ILS to malfunction, but rather that the chances of it doing so are extremely remote.
This is a classic example of reductio ad absurdum. By the same line of logic, we should ditch all our S&W's for Rugers because Rugers have ejector rods that cannot back out. The point is not that it is impossible for the ILS to malfunction, but rather that the chances of it doing so are extremely remote.
Web Man,
It’s funny in a way that I among others can admit that lock failures are rare and it does not really bother us if one carries and ILS gun yet many yourself included feel the need to argue to opposite here to the extreme.
First off in response to your point about S+W ejector rods unscrewing, I can tell you that personally, I would agree with you, in an absolute sense the ruger design is a "better" design as it can not back out and lock up the gun. In addition I do not know many engineers who would disagree with me. In absolute terms one should always design a devise to fail in the most benign way possible, in that sense the smith ejector rod as designed / manufactured is some manner of a poor idea.
Furthermore many of us apply thread locker when we service our guns to prevent this very failure mode. Does everyone? Do all gunsmiths agree that it is prudent to do so? No, it's a bit of a debate, like the ILS but I can tell you I would rather have to heat and cuss at an ejector rod when taking the gun down than have the gun lock up on us.
A similar situation exists with 1911 plunger tubes. You can have anything from original GI, to GI with a lip milled in the frame to add support, to a housing that is brazed or bonded to the frame as well as staked to bolt on, to a plunger tube cast / milled integral to the frame. All of these solutions seek to reduce or eliminate what is by most accounts anywhere from and uncommon to a very rare problem. Why I ask you is seeking to eliminate ILS failures which are admittedly rare not a good idea?
Second I am not reviewing and arguing auto lock cases with you, you seem interested in minimizing the number of failures for your own reasons, I will leave it at that.
Third what you are failing to grasp and insist on waving you hands around regarding your friend's experience with ventilators is I am not talking about a specific piece of equipment, I am speaking of HOW choices are made. In medicine we do not look at a given procedure and say if we can make it some small percent safer, even if it is expensive, we do not ignore that, we embrace it. It is one of the reasons medicine cost what it does and why people fear managed care. Do we want insurance companies or government commissions looking and saying 0.001% risk is fine, never mind if we could knock it down to 0.00001. I mean if you are the company managing it or the gov and are looking to save dollars that probably sounds great, but IF, YOU, or your brother, mother or sister is one of the ones that comes down to the bad side of that equation it could really stink.
Web Unless you are simply hopelessly invested in the ILS and it's alleged merits I do not think you can argue with this logic, even if as you say to YOU that risk is insignificant.
In the case of the ILS it need not cost anything to eliminate this risk whatever it is, just remove the lock.
As to aviation ask yourself this, when was the last time you heard of a jet turbine in commercial service suffering a catastrophic, stuff flys apart failure? As you have said Jets are infinitely more complex than revolvers. Yet the last time I can find of a jet going grenade is 1996 on a Delta jet. That’s pretty dang reliable. For something much more complex. They do not get that way ignoring the small chances of failure, they get there eliminating them at any chance they can. No one in aerospace engineering would design a lock that renders something critical inoperable in the event of a failure.
It’s funny in a way that I among others can admit that lock failures are rare and it does not really bother us if one carries and ILS gun yet many yourself included feel the need to argue to opposite here to the extreme.
First off in response to your point about S+W ejector rods unscrewing, I can tell you that personally, I would agree with you, in an absolute sense the ruger design is a "better" design as it can not back out and lock up the gun. In addition I do not know many engineers who would disagree with me. In absolute terms one should always design a devise to fail in the most benign way possible, in that sense the smith ejector rod as designed / manufactured is some manner of a poor idea.
Furthermore many of us apply thread locker when we service our guns to prevent this very failure mode. Does everyone? Do all gunsmiths agree that it is prudent to do so? No, it's a bit of a debate, like the ILS but I can tell you I would rather have to heat and cuss at an ejector rod when taking the gun down than have the gun lock up on us.
A similar situation exists with 1911 plunger tubes. You can have anything from original GI, to GI with a lip milled in the frame to add support, to a housing that is brazed or bonded to the frame as well as staked to bolt on, to a plunger tube cast / milled integral to the frame. All of these solutions seek to reduce or eliminate what is by most accounts anywhere from and uncommon to a very rare problem. Why I ask you is seeking to eliminate ILS failures which are admittedly rare not a good idea?
Second I am not reviewing and arguing auto lock cases with you, you seem interested in minimizing the number of failures for your own reasons, I will leave it at that.
Third what you are failing to grasp and insist on waving you hands around regarding your friend's experience with ventilators is I am not talking about a specific piece of equipment, I am speaking of HOW choices are made. In medicine we do not look at a given procedure and say if we can make it some small percent safer, even if it is expensive, we do not ignore that, we embrace it. It is one of the reasons medicine cost what it does and why people fear managed care. Do we want insurance companies or government commissions looking and saying 0.001% risk is fine, never mind if we could knock it down to 0.00001. I mean if you are the company managing it or the gov and are looking to save dollars that probably sounds great, but IF, YOU, or your brother, mother or sister is one of the ones that comes down to the bad side of that equation it could really stink.
Web Unless you are simply hopelessly invested in the ILS and it's alleged merits I do not think you can argue with this logic, even if as you say to YOU that risk is insignificant.
In the case of the ILS it need not cost anything to eliminate this risk whatever it is, just remove the lock.
As to aviation ask yourself this, when was the last time you heard of a jet turbine in commercial service suffering a catastrophic, stuff flys apart failure? As you have said Jets are infinitely more complex than revolvers. Yet the last time I can find of a jet going grenade is 1996 on a Delta jet. That’s pretty dang reliable. For something much more complex. They do not get that way ignoring the small chances of failure, they get there eliminating them at any chance they can. No one in aerospace engineering would design a lock that renders something critical inoperable in the event of a failure.
What's funny is that I, very early in this thread, said that I don't take issue with those who dislike the lock for reasons of personal preference. I only take issue with those who claim that the lock is a significant compromise in reliability because that simply isn't true. It was you that chose to take issue with the notion that the lock does not represent a statistically significant reliability compromise and when I showed you, mathematically, that my statement was true, you now choose to tell me that I'm argumentative. Seems like a case of the pot calling the kettle black to me.
You're missing my point. The point is that many, if not most, of the people who decry the lock as "one more thing to go wrong" are perfectly willing to take the risk of the ejector rod backing out on pre-lock revolvers even though there are other designs available which negate that risk as well. If even an extremely remote chance of failure, such as the ILS represents, is reason for these people not to carry a particular revolver, then why are they not carrying revolvers of arguably simpler and less trouble-prone design?
How am I minimizing the number of failures? I honestly gave you the only two documented cases that I'm aware of and invited you to enlighten me with others if you knew of them. Not only that, I intentionally ran calculations with ridiculously high estimates of failure. As I said before, math is math and even with the extremely high failure estimates I used, the failure rate still comes out extremely low. If you're referring to my distrust of anonymous internet posts, what would you have me do with them? I'm sorry, but I simply cannot bring myself to take unreliable data at face value. It only seems rational to me that if a set of data is known to be unreliable, one should seek out other data upon which to draw conclusions. Finally, your insinuations about me having an axe to grind and massaging data for my own reasons is becoming rather irritating. If you wish to accuse me of something, I wish you'd simply do it and quit beating around the bush.
What you are failing to grasp is that a comparison between medical equipment/aircraft and firearms is an extremely poor one. First of all, I think that your reliability estimates for medical equipment and aircraft is inaccurate. Secondly, medical equipment and aircraft failure rates are as low as they are not only because great care is taken in their design, but because they are more scrupulously and frequently maintained than firearms are. In order to maintain a firearm as scrupulously and frequently as most aircraft and medical equipment, you would have to have your gun inspected by a qualified gunsmith and preemptively have any part which shows signs of wear replaced each and every time you fire it. Firearms, by and large, are not maintained to this degree because, due to the fact that they are much simpler than medical equipment and aircraft, they don't need to be.
The problem is, there is cost associated with removing the lock. If the lock were discontinued or made completely optional by S&W, their costs to produce revolvers would increase and thus the retail price of their guns would also go up. The lack of the lock would make their products unsaleable in MD and thus, in order to maintain their profits, they'd have to charge the rest of us more. Likewise, dropping the lock could potentially expose S&W to greater legal liability than they already have. Lawyers and lawsuits are expensive and those costs would almost certainly be passed on to the consumer
If the lock is removed aftermarket, there are still costs involved. Many people are not mechanically-inclined enough to remove the lock themselves so they must have it done by a gunsmith. Gunsmiths don't work for free so there is a monetary cost. Even if the lock is removed by the owner, removing a safety device from a firearm opens its owner up to increased legal risk. I consider that risk to be a cost because if one plays those odds and loses, the price that must be paid is extremely high.
That being said, if you want to remove the locks from your guns, go right ahead. I am not the one that must take on those risks so it matters not to me. This does, however, bring us right back to the original question of this thread: why do people who dislike the lock choose to buy guns without it rather than simply removing or disabling it?
dahermit, aside from aesthetics, and symbolism, the other issue which has nothing to do with potential mechanical failure is one of potential bias issues with a prosecutor or jury.
How many threads have there been about not removing a magazine disconnect or other safety device from a carry weapon?
The point has been made by quite a few that this could be used by an overzealous prosecutor to paint a defendant as reckless. After all, he removed a safety device!
The odds of this happening are probably about as low as the odds of an individual lock failure. But, for many, it is an added concern.
How many threads have there been about not removing a magazine disconnect or other safety device from a carry weapon?
The point has been made by quite a few that this could be used by an overzealous prosecutor to paint a defendant as reckless. After all, he removed a safety device!
The odds of this happening are probably about as low as the odds of an individual lock failure. But, for many, it is an added concern.