The idea of a safety on a firearm, for many people, conjures up ideas of making the firearm less dangerous, and, to be fair, the whole point of a safety on a firearm is to keep the firearm from having a negligent discharge (hopefully for any reason).
Safety is the reason, after all, that so many daily carry pistols have mechanical trigger safeties, grip safeties, or internal components for the purpose of preventing the firearm from discharging for any reason other than an intentional pulling of the trigger.
So, many people take that idea one step further and choose to have firearms with manual safeties that have to be intentionally disengaged in order to fire the pistol.
Of course, the controversy around this is huge.
Many people take the side of always carrying with a manual safety and include, as part of their training, to disengage the safety as part of their drawstroke. If you go with this line of thinking, you want to be sure that the habit of disengaging the manual safety when you draw your firearm is so deeply ingrained in your muscle memory that you don’t have to think about it. You just do it as part of pulling out your pistol for the self defense situation.
Other people fall definitely on the side of not having a manual safety on their everyday carry pistol. Why? For simplicity and speed to first shot if, God forbid, you have to pull your firearm on someone in self-defense. Sometimes getting the first shot in a fraction of a second faster can save a life.
But, really, what is the best choice to go with for your daily carry firearm? That’s exactly what Massad Ayoob sets out to answer in the video below.
Did you watch the video?
I will admit that I’ve tended to fall on the side of carrying without a manual safety, and with my preference to being the grey man when it comes to concealed carry (meaning that I don’t want anyone to know that I’m carrying unless I have to pull it out to save a life), it’s pretty unlikely that anyone would know that I’m carrying, so they would be very unlikely to be able to take the gun from me to use it against me.
But Ayoob’s story about having a manual safety saving the lives of LEOs by preventing an aggressor from being able to make use of the firearm if they’re able to take it from you has me reconsidering whether I should change to carrying with a manual safety and training hard to make disengaging that safety part of my drawstroke.
What are your thoughts on this: Manual safety or no manual safety? Tell us below.
As always, the best way to practice your skills (including practicing including disengaging your manual safety as part of your drawstroke) is with dryfire. That’s why we’re giving away a FREE 30 day dryfire program that only takes 10-minutes per day here for you: http://freedryfire.com/YT
