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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: Gun of the Week
Topic ID: 26
Message ID: 3
#3, RE: Gun of the Week: Ruger .22 automatics
Posted by Gryphon on Mar-18-17 at 07:17 PM
In response to message #2
LAST EDITED ON Mar-18-17 AT 07:18 PM (EDT)
 
>Yeah, that does sound like a Lawyer Thing to do, especially for
>Lawyers That Have Never Actually Handled The Articles. "Oh, we can't
>actually rely on people to be properly trained to be
>instinctively safe and follow good, sound procedure when using the
>gun, so we need to add something so they don't need to remember to do
>it,"

In limited fairness, it may well be less that and more "someone once sued a manufacturer for not including something to warn them it's loaded, so I guess we'd better account for that..."

Upon reflection, I can see a case for some LCIs. Some service pistols (the Walther P38 comes to mind) have tactile ones, so you can tell if your sidearm is ready to fire without having to look at it, which I guess could come in handy in some field situations. Marketing that kind of thing as a safety device, though, I think is a dangerously misleading thing to do.

>(because it can and will fail

The mechanical ones certainly can. I've seen others—my Browning Hi-Power has one—that are purely visual, and so wouldn't fail in most situations where the gun itself is working properly. The chamber on newer Hi-Powers is notched:

so that if the chamber is loaded, you can see a bit of the cartridge rim there. That's never not going to work unless you can't see into the ejection port for some reason, in which case you probably have bigger problems.

I can't think of a situation a normal shooter might be in where pulling the slide back a little and looking inside wouldn't work just as well, though. Is your other hand unavailable? If so, then again, I would guess you have bigger problems than finding out if your Hi-Power is loaded. It's kind of a clever design trick, but I'm uncertain of its actual usefulness.

Also, in no case I can think of can any of these systems, be they mechanical indicators or just clever ways of showing a little of the cartridge, distinguish between an unfired cartridge and a fired one. So if you happened across a random pistol on the ground with the indicator showing (and for some reason cared to pick it up instead of leaving it the hell alone), you'd still have to open it to find out for sure what's going on.

I've tried to play devil's advocate with myself on this and come up with a pressing reason why you'd ever want one of these things, and I have never yet come up with a scenario that struck me as realistic in which it would actually be a useful feature. Certainly not to the extent that it would outweigh the false sense of security they may give the uninitiated.

>Oh, and your reaction to it does say you can actually be trusted to
>follow the procedures, because you recognize the exact scope of the
>problem that they've introduced.

The only time I can ever remember my grandfather speaking sharply to me was when he was teaching me to shoot. I don't remember exactly when that was, but my grandparents were still running their hunting lodge up in the north woods. They sold the lodge when I was in junior high school, so I can't have been more than 11 or 12 at the time we were doing this. They had a giant back yard with a disused logging road leading out of it into the woods; at some point Gramp had taken a backhoe or something out there and raised an earthen berm a few hundred yards from the house, then built some rough benches to stand targets on at intervals between the house and the berm. I didn't think to ask at the time, but I'm guessing they were at whatever the standard range intervals were for the Army Reserve match shooting he used to do in the '50s and '60s.

Anyway, back by the house at the firing line, he had an old picnic table with a couple of sandbags on it, for testing sight adjustments and the like. (I assume their customers used it to sight in their deer rifles as well.) We started there, shooting from the sandbags with a .22-caliber bolt-action rifle he had cut down to a sort of kiddie size for my aunt Dot when she was little. The rifle had no magazine, just loaded and fired one round at a time, but otherwise operated in much the same way as your average WWI infantry rifle, on a smaller scale.

I don't remember now if it was on the first shot, but at some point early in this lesson, I fired, then left the rifle where it was and made to get up and go see where I'd hit the target. This was what I'd been instructed to do, except in my excitement I'd left out a step. I was pulled up short as much by the urgency in Gramp's voice as his actual words as he barked, "Open that bolt!"

So yeah. I, uh, don't leave chambers in Uncertain Condition.

--G.
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