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In this case it is an important distinction. A revolver, if not cocked, requires a strong pull of the trigger to engage that double action system. A cocked revolver's hammer is just itching to go off, which in this situation is very bad.
The photo shows what I believe is a Glock 17 pistol. The Glock does not have manual safety mechanism, which means that if there is a round in the chamber, that gun is ready to shoot. Although the Glock has a single action system that requires a full pull of the trigger before it shoots, it is a relatively soft pull (I own two), especially when compared to a double action revolver.
The photo shows the officer exercising trigger discipline by keeping his finger off the trigger, but that is where the discipline ends. You NEVER point a gun at something you are not willing to kill. Killing a prone, restrained, unarmed man is murder, plus the ricochet off the ground would likely hit another cop on that dog pile. That stupid son of a removed would have killed at least one person and spent the rest of his life in prison. Absolute gross negligence.
If I was his commander, I would restrict him to desk duty for at least a year (effectively blocking him from overtime pay) and force him to take and pass a third-party weapons safety program before he's allowed to carry a weapon again.
Hahaha I wish I had your faith
Well, I suspect he was very much ready to kill him
At the moment, I don't doubt it. Guys that do stupid shit like this aren't thinking. They are letting their emotions and adrenaline do the driving. That's why you have to hammer training into their brains. It's not because it is complicated, its because you want it to be so natural that thought doesn't even come into play.
"You don't rise to the occasion, you fall to your level of training."
Eh, or they are and this is the emotion they want to feel, the power over others. Which makes them the wrong choice to be a cop, but the "right" choice when it comes to how most departments actually are right now.
It's almost as if allowing just about anyone to purchase a semiautomatic firearm is a bad idea.
Like almost as though people have shown again and again that they should not be trusted with firearms, let alone have the ability to walk into a gun show and walk out with an AR-15 in under an hour.
But please, everyone tell me about how this is really a mental health issue (that they also refuse to address).
Law Enforcement, remember this article is about a Cop, isn't "just anyone". There's two reasons for people being riled up about this, one of which is criminal and the other is user error / training.
Ignoring the criminal aspect of what he's doing the Cop literally cannot fire that weapon without endangering himself and his fellow officers. He also can't fire that weapon a second time without manually manipulating it because he's using it in a manner that WILL cause it to mechanically malfunction.
It's fucking stupid (and criminal) all the way around but it has nothing to do with the points you are making.
The article beneath the headline actually says
FWIW, headlines and subtitles usually aren't written by the journalist bylining the piece, they're typically handled by an editor who supervises a bunch of journalists reporting out a bunch of different stories and decides which to publish when (or, more likely, which to forward on to a committee of more senior editors who will decide which of those to publish and when).
So I'd bet an editor read through this story in about 90 seconds and then just said something like, "'Glock 22' obviously isn't going to tell the average reader anything because I don't know what that is, so let's just say 'revolver' because it's all the same to me. Now, on to the three dozen other stories I need to review because my bosses keep cutting our staffing and I'm doing three people's jobs."
The Glock has three safeties designed to prevent the weapon from firing if the trigger hasn't been pulled correctly. One of these prevents the trigger from moving backwards unless it is depressed inside the trigger guard. You clearly know all this.
The term you're looking for is "affirmative safety", one type of which would be the common switch on the side of the frame that prevents the trigger from being pulled until it is disengaged in an action distinct from pulling the trigger. The Glock does not have an affirmative safety.
Source: certified Glock armorer
Thank you.
The point of the article is clearly the unacceptable behavior of the officer but damn does it make my teeth itch when Journalists fail basic fact checks like Pistol / Revolver. I always wonder what else they got wrong.
How the fuck is this legal? Seems like requiring a manual safety mechanism on all firearms is a no-brainer.
Any of the folks who place more value in their ability to end another person's life on a split second than the safety of their own children want to chime in and explain this one to me?
It doesn't have a switch or button you have to manually toggle. There are safety devices that automatically disable by pulling the trigger or holding the grip, these are more common on pistols.
Glocks in particular are incredibly safe when it comes to accidental discharge. They physically can't fire without the trigger being pulled.
My favorite pistol is a Para Ordinance Tac Four LDA. The LDA acts in a very similar manner to Glock's once a round is chambered (hammer cocked). The Light Double Action still requires a full pull to discharge but it has a similar trigger tension to a Glock rather than a traditional double action. The reason this weapon is my favorite is because in addition to the accidental discharge safety feature it also has a full grip safety which requires you ti actually palm the weapon, and a manual thumb safety. There is absolutely no way to argue accidental shooting with that weapon. Even if you chamber a round, cock the LDA, palm the pistol, disengage the manual safety, your finger was on the trigger and it somehow twitched, the LDA's travel and tension is such that the weapon would still not discharge.
Does it require extra training to get the safety on/off motion to be muscle memory? Yes. Does the weapon have a slower "rounds per second" than a Glock? A little bit. Do I feel more comfortable with it in my hand than a Glock? Absolutely. I wish Glock had an model that integrated all of the features that used to be in the Paras.
Glock, an Austrian company, uses a variety of common sense safeties that are automatic in nature.
With a manual safety the user has to remember to engage / dis-engage it as appropriate. This means a weapon can be left in an unsecured state simply because the user forgot (or elected not too) engage the manual safety. Conversely if the user forgets to disengage the manual safety the weapon will not fire when they need it too, which makes an awful lot of sense when you know that Glock designed these weapons for Law Enforcement.
To work around the weaknesses of a Manual Safety Glock designed what it calls its "Safe Action System" which you can read about here.. In a nutshell a Glock will not fire unless the trigger is intentionally pulled in the correct way.
Other pistol manufacturers will have some, or all, of those feature and may have other things such as "Grip Safeties" where you have to be holding the pistol both correctly and tightly enough before it can discharge.
There's quite a variety of automatic safeties in use in the pistol world. If you are interested you can read about them here.
On balance these kinds of automatic safeties are at least as effective as a manual safety and there are valid arguments with empirical evidence showing that they can be safer.
Could you explain why you are using such inflammatory language? NO safety can or is meant to make a loaded firearm safe from a child. It's arguably easier for a child to flip the selector lever on a manual safety than it is for one to grip a firearm a specific way or pull its trigger in a specific way (or both).
Loaded weapons, regardless of their type(s) of safety mechanism, should not be left where they can be handled by children.
While the cop is doing horrible and dangerous intimidation.
It also my makes no tactical sense. Unlike a revolver if he shoots his automatic pressing unto someone, he'll have to at least manipulate the slide manually if he needs to make follow-up shots. He'll probably need to clear a failure to eject and/or a failure to feed.
So in short another angry cop doing multiple stupid and dangerous things.
Will he, though?
His commander should kick his ass, report him for endangerment, and then throw him out of the police station like in the movies when somebody gets thrown out of a saloon.
I’d reprimand him but for other reasons. Pressing the slide up against a person can cause the weapon to go out of battery. If the officer did need to pull the trigger there is a chance it would it not fire.
Edit: Nevermind, after a closer look the officer has the flashlight pressed against the suspects face. Giving some distance between the slide and his head, it should fire just fine.
The list of errors keeps growing from just a single still.
I don't think it is an important distinction at all. The point of the news article is that an officer pointed a very lethal weapon at a person's head while that person was restrained and (apparently the correct term is) supine. Does it really matter if the pull force for the gun to discharge or fire or whatever the preferred term is happens to be 5lbs vs 8lbs (made up numbers because I'm not a gun nerd who knows those things)? The point is exactly what you talk about in your third paragraph, not what you talk about in the first two.