Because a Glock doesn't have a safety lever. It's built into the trigger mechanism.
What, so pressing the trigger automatically disengages the safety? As a non-gun-person that seems like an insane design decision.
Correct. There's a few other internal safeties to help ensure it doesn't go off unless someone is pulling the trigger and (hopefully) intending to fire.
It's still drop safe and not going to go off by itself, but if you fire it (and there's a round in the chamber), it's going off.
>As a non-gun-person that seems like an insane design decision
There's certainly tradeoffs. It's simpler and you're not going to accidentally forget to disengage a safety at the worst possible time (when you actually need to be using a gun), but it does increase the risk when improperly handling the firearm which is a risk not everyone is cool with for obvious reasons (and even experienced operators (incl. Law Enforcement being generous, which largely carry Glocks) are human and can make mistakes).
That's much better than the opposite problem: forgetting to engage the safety and accidentally discharging.
> it does increase the risk when improperly handling the firearm
I just feel like having to toggle a switch before killing a man is the least you can do to avoid accidents.
If you're following the firearm safety rules you're not pointed at anything/anybody you don't wish to destroy so it's a moot point. (yourself included, though at least in that case nobody else was harmed needlessly)
A safety lockout (or lacktherof) shouldn't be a factor in your pointing of a gun at someone and pulling the trigger.
>I just feel like having to toggle a switch before killing a man is the least you can do to avoid accidents.
It's extremely rare for someone who isn't being extremely negligent to be in a position where they could "accidently" kill someone.
Could a safety prevent such an occurrence? It's very well possible and that might be a reason to prefer a firearm with sufficient safeties that increases your comfort.
On the other hand some people decided that they're cautious enough and by in large most people avoid accidents and practice good safety practices to avoid harm should one happen.
There's trade offs either way, but ultimately it's preference.
Relying on a safety to keep it “safe” is usually the first step in ventilation of the floor or ceiling.
Play-guns for the shooting range? Sure, add fifty safeties if you want.
But guns are used for other purposes, and there is a failure mode where the person holding the weapon intended to fire and end someone's life and the gun fails to do so because the safety was still engaged.
Many things are purposely designed "fail-safe" but some things are designed to "fail deadly" for very good reasons.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the negligent discharges that can be categorized as "I thought the safety was on and was pulling the trigger like a moron" is much higher than "I knew the gun only had a grip/trigger safety and was pulling the trigger like a moron".
ok, so the group "most people using firearms" and the group "most people using websites" do not significantly overlap is what I'm hearing?
https://crimefictionbook.com/2016/02/04/do-glocks-have-safet...
But (as I learned only recently) there are guns around with actually no "proper" safety and one model at least is particularly prone to fire accidentally:
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/04/sig-sauer-p320-upgrade-safe...
A lot of the issues in general seem to come about around holstering which is one of the situations where you're most likely to be "breaking" the rules pointing towards yourself, certainly not ideal.
Reholstering is one of the stronger objective arguments for a safety, but that still assumes the safeties themselves are properly designed.
Glocks have a system that is systems called "safe action" where there is a system of internal locks that prevents the weapon from firing in situations where the gun is dropped, hit by a car, struck from the side, &c -- this is not really what most people are thinking of when they think of a safety. It turns out to be very important in practice, though. If a police car gets hit by another car and the guns go off that's going to be a bad day for everyone.
It does seem like the right balance hasn't been found yet.
This sort of thing is unfortunately somewhat common:
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/04/sig-sauer-p320-upgrade-safe...
One of the golden rules of gun safety is to not point a gun at something you do not intend to kill (the rule usually uses "destroy" because gun culture loves playing down the danger of guns) so if this is actually an issue then responsible gun owners are not as common as they should be.
For the most part, the development of striker fired pistols and duty holsters was driven by police and military use; these are contexts where a person draws a pistol several times a day (on some days) and hundreds or thousands of times a year. General process safety concerns -- like reducing the number of "safe" states that people have to think about -- do matter in that context.
"Loaded straight into fairly skinny jeans without checking the safety." -- Glocks do not have safeties.
The idea with most newer striker-fired pistols, like the Glock, is that the gun goes in a hard-sided (molded nylon or kydex) holster. If it's not in the holster, it's ready to fire. If that is not safe in the situation you are in, put it back in the holster.
Rifles, shotguns, &c, are never holstered; so if it is time to fire the weapon, you deactivate the safety; otherwise, it is left on safe. Because pistols have the extra step of being holstered, it turns out be work well in practice not to have the intermediate unholstered-but-safe step.
Handguns are registered to a tiny degree. The NICS checks records may be kept only on paper, and are kept by the gun dealer until they close business. Then the BATFE or a related govt. office gets them. By order of congress, this office is not allowed to computerize.
A registry connects a particular gun -- a particular serial number -- to a particular person. A NICS check doesn't do that -- it's a criminal background check. Just because you have a NICS check, it doesn't mean you bought any particular gun. You could pass the background check and then decide you don't want the gun after all.
You may be referring to a Form 4473 -- the DRoS (Dealer Record of Sale) -- which does record which person received which gun (with serial number) -- and all licensed dealers maintain these records, for all guns they sell (not just handguns). These records form a sort of a search tree, since the manufacturer records which wholesaler the serial number went to the, the wholesaler records the retailer and the retailer records the end user. These records are useful in regulating the traffic in arms; but the decentralized nature of them means that the government can not go on fishing expeditions -- can not just go out and query the database and see what looks interesting today.
Here's how the DRoS are used in regulating the arms trade. Say police come across a big box of guns from Colt. They can go to Colt with a suitable warrant and say, hey, where did these go to? And then go to the wholesaler, on down the tree. It turns out this information is often sufficient to localize shady gun dealers who are trying to sell to the mob, the cartels, &c.
However, some states have banned private transfers of handguns or of all guns. This means, in practice, that people must perform the transfer through licensed dealers.
It is illegal in the United States to be in the firearms business without a license. It is legal for private people to transfer firearms to one another without filling out a 4473. So on the one hand, we have the business of selling guns and filling out 4473s and maintaining records according to the ATF's rules, and the majority of transfers of guns take place according to these rules; and on the other, we have people who give a gun to their son or daughter as a birthday present, or sell a few guns they no longer use. In the middle, we have a grey area -- people who sell a few guns every year, &c. Occasionally, people in the grey area get caught; and it's not a good place to be in; so people who occasionally sell guns but have no interest in being in the firearms business will actually transfer through a licensed dealer (the seller transfers to the dealer, who then transfers to the buyer, charging a nominal fee). For example, when people sell guns on GunBroker.com, they almost always intermediate the transaction through a licensed dealer.
This is what people are talking about when they say "universal background checks" and "the gun show loophole". Now, "the gun show loophole" seems like a completely ridiculous idea. I do not see how progressives can believe it exists; and I do not see how this could possibly occur with any frequency. The ATF knows where the gun shows are. Maybe progressives think the ATF is not going to the gun shows looking for people selling guns without a license? I don't think anyone who knows anything about selling guns believes for one moment that the best place to sell guns illegally is a place, like a gun show, that is literally crawling with cops from agencies at all levels of government (not only to keep an eye on things but also as customers).
Though one of the gripes with NICS is as far as I know it does not fail safe, if a local LE or reporting agency ignores the request or does not process it in a timely manner, the person may get a false pass.
Regarding NICS, it is supposed to instant -- National Instant Check System -- and it is generally quite fast. The issue is not with an agency ignoring the request but rather with agencies not forwarding the data they are supposed to forward. If it's not in the database when the check is run, the check comes back clean -- most NICS checks complete in a few minutes.
If for some reason a NICS check does not complete in two or three days or something like that, yes, it defaults to open and the person gets their gun. That is how it should be. There must never be a possibility for the government to prevent the trade in arms, either for particular people or for the whole country, simply by delaying things without explanation. Process delays are one of many tools governments abuse. If the data is not in the database, another 2 days is probably not going to get it there. Something has to be done about the agencies that don't forward their data, yes; but opening up an avenue for sideways stuff on the part of the government is not the solution.
In the United States, it is illegal to transfer a firearm to a felon (and probably to all other categories of person who would be denied by NICS) -- this is another reason, one I didn't mention, that most sales brokered by GunBroker go through a licensed dealer. A licensed dealer has access to NICS. A regular person doesn't. If they do a private party transfer and, lo and behold, the person they transfer to is a felon, they are in big trouble. They would rather not be in trouble so they delegate to the dealer to handle the transfer.
Dealers maintain none-paper records, too -- as do manufacturers. They have DRoS systems which are electronic. This makes it easy for them to provide data to the ATF when a suitable warrant is presented. What prevents the data from being a resource for government fishing expeditions? It's two things:
* The ATF is formally forbidden from centralizing the data in a big data warehouse -- it is technically against the law to maintain a federal gun registry.
* It is legal to transfer guns, albeit only in special circumstances, outside the system.
These two things together prevent the available information being used for a fishing expedition. Firstly, the government is not allowed to assemble the data; and secondly, the available data is imperfect -- it is not proof that a particular person owns a particular gun or even any guns.
The way this data works, it's not a big problem for combatting the illegal traffic in arms. A large part of that is identifying where, exactly, the arms exited the formal arms business and entered the black market. The data is perfectly suitable for that.
The data can't be used to show that this or that person definitely has this or that gun; and it can't be used to show which people have which guns, or how many people have more than ten, or anything like that. That is a good thing. Those are guns held by private citizens; they are private people, it's their private business.
Gun registries are not of much use for solving crimes related to guns. Criminals don't use leave behind guns that can be traced to them; and if a criminal is apprehended with a gun that may have been used in a crime, the gun has to be tied to the crime through physical evidence -- powder residue and stuff like that. It's not like there's some serial number at the scene of the crime that can be used to find the gun somehow!
They have different sources (one, poor access to mental healthcare, the other, poverty) and probably need different solutions too. I personally dont care as much about mass shootings, because in the grand scheme of gun crimes, lots less die. Nevermind Suicide, which is just access to mental healthcare.
I'm really interested in making poor communities safer, and reducing the transactions in illegal guns - but tbh, thats like trying to bail out a rowboat with a thimble - and without dealing with the underlying causes of gun crime folks debating in this space are effectively arguing about what color a building ought to be, while its also actively on fire.
In the end, I think everyone who buys a gun should have to go thru the same process, and should undergo a background check, and that a fail dangerous system is bad - now how we go about fixing that issue? thats another question entirely.
Private people, although they have the right to do so, don't generally transfer guns directly to strangers, because of the possibility of criminal prosecution for transfer to a prohibited person.
There are some improvements we can make to NICS -- but they all have to do with making sure the data is actually there.
https://www.stlpr.org/government-politics-issues/2022-04-29/...
Keep in mind that, in the absence of data indicating a conviction, a person is just going to get cleared in a few minutes. NICS checks basically never take even an hour, let alone a day; the time limit of three days is there to prevent the relevant agencies from engaging in malicious delays.
You have to have time limits like that for most government procedures; and we can't presume, in the absence of evidence, that someone should be denied. You are suggesting we give up something fundamental and general -- the presumption of innocence -- when you argue that NICS should default to closed.
I interpreted this as the cop having simply stolen the guns from their registered owners through some sort of search or seizure process.
Maybe it would help with the sleep terrors, maybe it would result in a rainbow colored cat.
Another thing that people do is set up a holster behind the headboard or somewhere else where they know to get at it.
There are loopholes, but there are reasons to prefer a gun that was last purchased under someone else's name, ideally someone you don't know at all.
Regardless, the thing I found interesting was the COP's perception of the value of the guns.
About ten years ago, i was buying weed from a cop (i got the hookup through his highschool friend). He bragged that every one of the ten or so AR15s on the wall in his bedroom over his gravity bong and below the bullet holes was registered to a different person. Why he thought that might have interested or impressed me is something I still try to puzzle out on late nights.
Interestingly, same city for both events.