If you are ever going to have an AD, it will be carrying a 1911 in Condition 2 (Hammer down on a live round). You have 2 chances to go bang if you let the hammer slip, one letting it down, and 2 cocking it. I personally carry condition 1, and if I couldn't do that, it would be Condition 3.
ADs are not all created equal.
In going to Condition 2, one is hopefully pointing the gun in a safe direction, outside the home or car, something that is not a problem for people like me that live in the country or keep a bucket of sand in their garage. Do it once, carry all day, then unload at day's end, again pointing the gun in a safe direction. An AD would not be welcome but wouldn't present much danger, either.
By contrast, Condition 1 requires working safeties all the time. I've seen safeties fail on loaded rifles (the infamous Remington M700 Fire-On-Release safety issue) and my S&W manufactured PPK/S was subject to a factory recall due to a problem with the hammer-drop safety causing ADs when activated on a loaded chamber. How many LE types have shot themselves in the leg or foot while holstering their gun with a round in the chamber? An Aurora cop was killed some years back in a training session because someone else's gun was loaded in the chamber (inappropriately, to be sure, but loaded nevertheless).
Like Condition 2, going to and from Condition 1 presents two opportunities for an AD. Condition 1 also presents a constant and much higher possibility of an AD due to failed safeties, safeties inadvertently being pushed off, mishandling, mental lapses, whatever. In the many hundreds of times I've had a concealed firearm with me I've never once needed to go to Condition 1 or 2. That is many hundreds of times X 2 that an opportunity for an AD has been avoided. The one time I would have gone to Condition 1 my only weapon was a folding defensive knife - but I had plenty of time to make it - or a firearm - ready.
By the way, someone mentioned hunting with an empty chamber and suggested it is the only sensible way. It is not my way, at least not most of the time, and in 30 years of hunting Colorado's big game I can't think of a single instance where an empty chamber cost me an animal. The arguments for an empty chamber while hunting are pretty much the same as for carrying in Condition 3. Both are perfectly rational depending on a person's individual situation.
