1911Tuner
Moderator Emeritus
I question my own presence of mind to flip on the safety, especially in the heat of battle.
Repetitive motion. Presence of mind not necessary. Do the same thing over and over and it becomes automatic. This has been proven.
In the 70s, an Illinois state trooper became involved in a shooting. According to witnesses, he shot his revolver dry...dumped the empty brass in his hand...made a quarter turn to his left, and died while he stood looking for the bucket that wasn't there to drop his brass into...because he'd performed that series of moves on the practice range over and over and over. Funny thing, stress. That's why we should be careful of repetitive moves that we make while shooting for recreation. We tend to repeat them without thinking when the game is real.
While I'm sure that the US Army taught them to remove their fingers from the trigger before reholstering, it's a more difficult move to make. Under stress, we tend to clench our fingers into a fist...not straighten them out. So it becomes an unnatural move. While there are no guarantees, teaching both would reduce the probability of a discharge into one's own leg or into the horse. And, finally, the slide-locking feature was given consideration as well, and was likely equally important.
That comment was a little tongue in cheek but since the safety is most often originally attributed to the needs of the mounted rider I thought I'd throw it out there.
Mounted rider notwithstanding, there are still holsters to put pistols into and stress can be found today on a city street as well as the French countryside in 1918. Pistols that get jammed into holsters after a tense moment can still discharge if the finger isn't removed from the trigger. The term that's has been added to our lexicon that addresses the phenomenon is "Glock Leg" and it seems to happen pretty often.
I just wonder how much or often it was deployed as designed or requested.
There's no way of knowing.
The outcry seems to be that we'll forget to engage or disengage a manual safety. Yet, thousands of people use manual safeties year in and year out. If the problem was a common one, it would have been well documented by now.