Not That Safe?

Kim du Toit
May 9, 2008
12:45 PM CDT

Quite a few people sent me the various reports on this incident:

RIVERDALE, Utah (AP)—The police chief who shot himself in the ankle was waving a loaded pistol and being careless, according to two students who were attending his class to qualify for a concealed-weapons permit. “We were told the gun is the chief’s personal sidearm, but it looked to me like he didn’t know anything about the gun,” Lewis Walker said.

Bart Ulm, another student seeking certification to carry a concealed weapon, said he was surprised Chief Dave Hansen was using a loaded gun to show how it worked.

“Right then, I was very leery, because there’s no need to have live ammo in a gun in the class. But I figured he’s the chief, so he must know what he’s doing,” Ulm told the Standard-Examiner of Ogden.

Hansen held the Glock 40 under a table to disassemble it when a bullet fired, Walker said.

The chief cried, “I’m hit,” and fell over. Students who were screaming “Officer down!” were urged to call 911.

I’m not going to comment about the stupidity of the cop, because that would be redundant. Anyone who owns a gun has a duty to know how it works, and knowing how to unload it without shooting yourself is probably Job 1 in that regard.

What interests me is the gun—specifically, the type of gun.

I have always thought that the double-action (DA) pistol is an example of an engineering solution to a training problem. I’m generally somewhat flippant about it—I don’t own a DA pistol, and am unlikely to do so unless it’s a piece of history—and I usually say something like “If I want to shoot DA, I’ll use a revolver” or “If John Moses Browning had intended for double-action semi-auto pistols to exist, he would have made one that way.”

But I do have a serious point to make about DA pistols. If you don’t know what you’re doing, or are an idiot, it’s easy to leave a round chambered, thinking that you’ve unloaded the piece just by popping the magazine out. Worse still, unless you draw the slide back to check, it’s impossible to see whether the gun is still loaded—except of course, if your gun has one of those “loaded chamber” indicators (yet another example of an engineering fix to address a training problem).

And yes, it’s also possible to do the same with a single-action pistol—but it has been my experience that SA-only pistoleros tend to be more knowledgeable about pistols than people who use DA pistols exclusively, and thus accidental discharges (ADs) are relatively rare with SA pistols.

Of course, the number of ADs made with Glocks is not a knock on the pistol itself; that’s merely a factor because of the number of Glocks out there—statistically, the greater number of guns owned means a greater number of morons. Bookies will not be denied, in other words.

But I have to tell you, it’s awfully difficult for someone to leave a round in a revolver cylinder. The very nature of the piece means that if the cylinder is open, you see all the chambers at once, and a single round stands out like a kitten on a tablecloth.

I think, in other words, that it’s considerably more difficult to have an AD with a DA revolver than it is with a DA pistol. You have to be a complete moron to have an accidental discharge with a double-action revolver.

Which is why the only non-mechanical AD I’ve ever had was with a DA revolver.

But that’s a story for another time.