Plastic Striker fired noob question

Pulling the trigger can fire the gun.

If it is actually unloaded it won’t, but plenty of people have said “I always unload so it isn’t a problem” and proceeded to put a hole they didn’t mean to into something/someone.

Some striker fired pistols require you to dry fire them as part of field stripping. Others do not.

That’s the real difference. If you have a pistol that requires dry firing, and you make a mistake, your mistake can have consequences. If your pistol can be field stripped without dry firing, you can avoid that risk.

I don’t think the gun will come to any harm if you decide to take the risk anyway, but, again, if you make a mistake there’s a good chance something/someone will be harmed.

edit: correcting the autocorrect

Outlaw75 said:

Yes, but you can't access the sear lever without locking the slide back. I may be wrong, but an ND would be pretty much impossible at that point. Hence the reason for my confusion.

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Pull the trigger if you want. S&W just gave you another option in the event you don't want to pull the trigger to disassemble your gun.

If you shoot something disassembling a Glock, you can only blame yourself tor failing to ensure the mag was removed and the chamber was empty.

With the S&W, if you shoot something when disassembling your S&W, you can not only blame yourself for failing to ensure the mag was removed and the chamber was empty, but you can also blame yourself for choosing to ignore a safety feature the manufacturer gave you to make disassembly safer.

My M&P CORE has the sear lever and I sometimes use it. It's a little hard to reach without a screwdriver or pick. But I can see it's usefulness as an additional effort at safety. My XDm had a similar system, but I was replacing some parts and forgot to reinstall the part. Still haven't done so.

Outlaw75 said:

. . . the sear lever seems to be a selling point, specifically because it means you don't have to pull the trigger to decock the striker. . .

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Because the need to dry-fire for disassembly is a common criticism of Glock. I'll admit a moment of queasy every time. . .

Dry fire practice is critical.

If you can't clear a pistol safely, you shouldn't have one. ''Dry fire for disassembly'' has been a completely ignorant data point for many years. If a live round pops out of any pistol during disassembly, you done screwed up. Don't blame the pistol.

Zerodefect said:

''Dry fire for disassembly'' has been a completely ignorant data point for many years.

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In what sense is it “ignorant”? Are you saying you don’t really need to dry fire?

I don’t think it’s really a data driven concern so much as a logical one. Human mistake+dry fire=bad outcome. Logically, you want to eliminate “bad outcome” as a possibility you must eliminate either human mistakes or dry firing. People have been trying to eliminate human mistakes for as long as people have existed, and have clearly failed, so any answer that counts on eliminating human mistakes is suspect.

You can argue that you consider the risk a fair trade off to get a less expensive weapon, or that you are willing to pay more for extra parts to eliminate it, but either way it‘s more a logic point than a data point.

I prefer designs that prevent the end user from doing the wrong thing.

Field stripping a classic Sig is a great example. To throw the take down lever remove the slide you have to lock the slide open, this the user is forced to clear the weapon because of the way it’s designed.

Glock could have designed their pistol to remove the requirement to pull the trigger for disassembly, but they chose not to. The designer’s choice forces the end user to reliably do the right thing to avoid a ND. Can most people do this most of the time, yes. Some people are going to make mistakes though, and the design doesn’t prevent that.

BSW

This is something I haven't understood about the gun community as a whole. Some firearms you have to pull the trigger to take apart, some you don't, and some just makes the disassembly easier. In any of those models it is always unloaded first, whether you pull the trigger or not. If someone cannot properly clear the firearm before taking it apart, they have no business interacting with that firearm. I would much rather hurt someone's feelings by telling them let someone else handle the cleaning than assume they know the right way to clear and field strip, get it wrong and put a hole in something or someone.

herrwalther said:

This is something I haven't understood about the gun community as a whole. ...

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You are looking at it as a matter of competence. “If someone can’t...they have no business interacting with....”

But for other people it isn’t about competence, it’s about possibility and severity. Of course someone can clear a firearm, they can do it 10,000 times without a single failure. People can and should go their entire life without making that mistake. But if a mistake is possible, and the severity is high, that’s a risk. It will continue to be a risk no matter how competent the users are.

I’ll give you an example: the fuel fillers on cars are sized to prevent filling your tanks the wrong type of fuel. It’s not perfect but it eliminates some errors. The fuel fillers on airplanes do not have those protections in place. But everyone involved in fueling airplanes is trained, and the incompetent ones are filtered out quickly, so it’s generally not a problem.

Except when it is. Every few years a plane crashes because a chain of errors added up to plane with full tanks but just enough usable fuel to get off the ground. If the fuel fillers on airplanes were keyed, that type of error would be much less likely.

Same sort of things apply to guns. There are guns that require the safety to be disengaged to unload, and some people recognize that as a a risk and don’t like it. There are guns that require dry firing to field strip and some people recognize it as a risk and don’t like it. There are guns that require pulling the trigger while a round is chambered to put them in their designed carry configuration, and some people recognize that as a risk and don’t like it. All of those things are perfectly fine if done correctly, but if they can be eliminated with a different design without causing other problems, why wouldn’t you do that?

I have owned other handguns but now I am down to 4 autoloaders. For those 4 autoloaders there are 4 different ways to field strip them for cleaning. Maybe it is my fault for liking variety. I have a M&P 2.0 Compact. I like how it shoots. I like how it handles. It is a small thing to lock the slide back, take the doomaflitchey out of the grip insert, use it to flip the little lever down, rotate the take down lever, release the slide & take it off. I believe it took longer to type it than it does to do it. There is nothing wrong with being safe. I suspect firearms manufacturers attempt to CYA in any way possible to avoid getting sued for someone else's stupidity. Besides it is much easier than the old partially retract the slide & hold it there against the tension of the recoil spring while you try to push the slide stop out from the other side.

No matter how experienced you may be human error is a constant. You remove the magazine and then become distracted for a second. You turn back to the gun but don't realize in that split second that you didn't rack the slide to eject the round. You then pull the trigger. And that is a possibility for really experienced people. Then consider the large number of newer gun owners who don't really understand the mechanics of how a pistol works.

There's redundancy in the five firearms safety rules. You have to make 2 serious mistakes.

That's completely unacceptable.

I remember when police departments started going from revolvers to semiautomatic pistols. NDs were common with many different brands of guns.
And those hammer fire gun with the decockers . I remember where an officer decocked his Sig, removed the mag and proceeded to shoot a hole through the table.
I can tell you this. I have carried, fired and cleaned many guns over the years. I’ve carried Glocks for the last 18 years. Never once have I pulled the trigger without checking to see it the chamber was cleared, unless I was firing the gun. Yes people make mistakes. But for the ones that forget to clear the chamber and end up shooting someone, or something important, they made more then one mistake.
The rules are simple. Drop the mag. Clear the chamber. Point in safe direction and pull the trigger.
But we still see people get all worked up about guns that have to be dry fired vs those that don’t, to disassemble.
I feel that it’s about the same as those that get worked up over manual safeties on striker fire guns.
The answer is simple for both. There are many different guns on the market. Pick the one that fits your needs and skill sets.
I own several Polymer frame striker fire guns, three of which are M&Ps. Having to have to move the sear lever down does insure that you remove the magazine and pull the slide to the rear. But to me, it just one more part to break on a gun. Oh! Don’t try and put the slide back on the gun if the sear lever gets bumped back up while cleaning.
Now don’t think that I’m putting down the M&P. It happens to be my favorite polymer frame striker fire pistol.
Here are just some of the polymer frame striker fire pistols I own.


Having a gun that I have to decock before It can be disassembled is no big deal for me. For some people this is scary, for some it’s just a concern, and for others it’s a dislike. But for what ever reason, if a gun that has to be decocked is not for you, just but one that doesn’t require it.

GunnyUSMC said:

But we still see people get all worked up about guns that have to be dry fired vs those that don’t, to disassemble. ...

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I find it interesting to look at who gets worked up.

Look at this thread: Someone asked what it was for. That was answered with a simple explanation of why the feature exists. Nobody was worked up. Nobody even said it was a good feature, just “here’s the reasoning behind it, and some people like it, others don’t consider it important.”

Then people started coming in to say things like “anyone who would value that feature shouldn’t own guns”, which sounds pretty worked up. It clearly offends some people that the feature exists.

For the record, I’ve owned guns that require dry firing, and I’ve owned guns that don’t. I have never especially cared one way or the other, but I do recognize that eliminating the need to dry fire objectively removes a risk. Do I think I will make a mistake? No, of course not, nobody does. Do I think that I’m better off if other people’s guns have that feature? Well yeah I’ve been to enough public shooting ranges to know that my biggest exposure to gun risk is not that I’m likely to make mistakes, but that other people are likely to make mistakes that impact me.

Ed Ames said:

Same sort of things apply to guns. There are guns that require the safety to be disengaged to unload, and some people recognize that as a a risk and don’t like it.

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I do not agree. I have never felt at risk by any weapon I have owned where pulling the trigger was required. A round cannot teleport into a chamber. Clear a weapon right, take apart. Pulling the trigger makes no difference if the chamber is empty.

herrwalther said:

I do not agree. I have never felt at risk by any weapon I have owned where pulling the trigger was required. A round cannot teleport into a chamber. Clear a weapon right, take apart. Pulling the trigger makes no difference if the chamber is empty.

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Shrug. As I said, “some people recognize it as a risk and don’t like it.” That ‘some’ do would imply that others don’t. You’re one of the others. No big deal.

Outlaw75 said:

Never been in to the polymer, striker fired guns; but recently I got an itch and scratched it by picking up an M&P 9 Shield 2.0. I've noticed is that the sear lever seems to be a selling point, specifically because it means you don't have to pull the trigger to decock the striker when dismantling. Is there a reason for not pulling the trigger when dismantling?

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Some where made like that as other have said, But it will not hurt the firearm if you choose to pull the trigger to take the slide off. I am used to doing that way as i started out with glocks. So i just do the same practice for the M&P's. I would not worry about hurting anything in the pistol. I have been doing for a long time with my 1.0 M&Ps.