Birdy, you stated that you can tell if a revolver is loaded by looking at it, please illuminate. If I look at the cylinder from the rear i cannot tell if the brass has been fired or not w/out close examination. Do you think the person you described will examine for primer strikes or just look at the gun from the front?
I don't understand why people think that a revolver is the EZ button for an untrained gun owner.
mike r
Didn't say it was an EZ button, I do say the majority, maybe even the vast majority, of people buying stuff at the gun counters in response to a crisis are untrained gun owners.
ca. 1972, neighbor's house, NY suburbs. Handguns just weren't a thing many people had in that time and place. Neighbors teenage kid's dad had a snubbie .357 what was in hindsight a k-frame Smith, hidden securely away. Of course kid finds it and when his dad was out we went and looked, first handgun I ever handled. Kid's dad never took him shooting,acted like the gun was a secret, kid had scarcely more experience holding it than I did, and I had never touched a handgun before.
Ya ever see someone older than maybe twelve handle a handgun who ain't familiar with 'em? They don't just up and point them, they examine them all over first like a curious monkey, muzzle going everywhere. Yep, them brass cartridges was pretty obvious, dunno that we would have known to look into the cylinder to check if there were bullets (who leaves spent cartridges in a revolver anyway?). He points the revolver at arm's length, presses a bit on the trigger, trigger begins to give, cylinder moves, he stops. I don't recall unloading it, prob'ly we didn't know how because if we did we would have prob'ly unloaded and loaded it again repeatedly. If nothing else just to look at the cartridges.
If it had been a Glock... would we have known to drop the magazine and rack the slide? Today maybe from all the movies and video games, absent that, we would have found an inscrutable black handgun with a 1/4" 5.5lb trigger.
Some teenage girl just accidentally shot and killed her friend the other week in this town, in this case with a stolen handgun. Been a few over the years not involving stolen guns. I knew a student I always thought well of on account of one time his friends had left him all the way across town, maybe twenty miles and he walked home overnight, didn't b$tch or whine or wake up his mom. I was impressed by that. The following summer he got accidentally shot in the neck by a friend when they were looking at a handgun, bled out and died. Might have been a revolver, but most likely was an auto.
Might as well address dry-firing. Yep, early on I put a bullet through a wall dry firing, no one on the other side, nothing got hurt except the wall and my self-esteem. Early in the morning I had disassembled and cleaned my revolver, put it back together. Got interrupted by the coffee pot, came back and idly dry fired the gun at that same spot like I had done prob'ly a hundred times before, except I had forgot that I had reloaded it. Ya, I know I'm a dumb fugh etc etc but I'm in good company. I have read police stations all across America have holes in them. Even Bill Jordan put a hole in a wall once, possibly when dry firing.
I figure anything that puts into your muscle memory
"pull trigger; harmless click.... pull trigger; harmless click... pull trigger;harmless click" is a bad thing. I still dry fire once in a while, at the range. Most often I'll leave an empty chamber in a revolver to check for flinching or jerking the trigger. I still get a case of the willies at just up and dry-firing an empty gun tho, that one incident made me permanently more careful.
I really like the Glock 19, if I could have only one handgun it would be a 19, it is unfortunate tho that you have to dry-fire it before you can take it apart to clean it. I figure lots of Cops and Security Guards, not usually gun people, dry-fire their Glocks to take it apart as much as they fire it live.
We had a Sheriffs Deputy fatally shoot herself in the abdomen here once after she had apparently got the "drop magazine... rack slide" order wrong when she "unloaded" it and then depressed the trigger. A similar thing was posted on video here some time back where a guy's adult son had handed his dad a Glock and the dad thought it was already cleared, shot himself in the hand as he pulled the trigger so he could remove the slide. Same thing; his muscle memory told him
"pull trigger; harmless click"... when you're disassembling a Glock.
Of course the rules of safe gun handling were broken in every incidence, but humans is fallible.
I'm sure YMMV.
