My opinion is that carrying with the chamber empty is a poor excuse for firearm safety. Everyone that I know that does such a thing tends to either have poor weapon handling skills, or they are overzealous/don't understand firearm safety. The same people often want a stiff trigger much like a DA trigger on a revolver because they are "safer".
I have been in the closest thing to a actual shootout, aka simunition training. I went through a sudden assault scenario and had I left my chamber empty I would have wasted seconds extra (when it already took me a few seconds to respond to the threat due to the shock of the sudden assault). Not to mention your fine motor skills go out the window when your in the fight or flight response. I would not trust myself to be able to rack the slide and get a round chambered without the potential to cause a jam. All it would take is riding the slide a little bit to long and you might cause a jam.
I wish everyone could go through the experience I did, because I think after you saw a video of your delayed reaction, fumbling with the gun to get a round in the chamber, then shooting, you might see how much better it would be to carry one in the pipe. Modern guns are safe with one in the chamber. Even more so when you use a holster which will make it hard to put your booger hook on the bang switch, (thus making it even safer for you if you have poor weapon safety skills).
I might get some slack for saying this but here it goes. I think that many people that keep their guns unloaded for “safety” are inherently unsafe with firearms. I have met too many people that grab their guns and handle them poorly since “they know they are safe” because they don’t ever put ammo in them unless they are on the range. They seem to rely on the fact they don’t remember putting ammo in the chamber as a substitution to checking the chamber to see if its loaded. Such people often rely on heavy trigger pulls, installation of manual safeties on guns that never came with them, long trigger pulls, and every other doodad to make the gun “less capable of firing if the trigger is pulled”. I have news for such people, installing a manual safety, a push trigger safety, never loading one in the chamber unless your on the range, keeping the ammo in a different room, etc to your glock is not going to make it any safer if you have poor safety then just handling a unmodified one properly.
You can find someone who has NDed any firearm out there regardless of how many safeties are on the gun. It always comes down to someone pulling the trigger when there is a round in the chamber.
