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Comment by dogorman | Hacker News Reader

> (accidental trigger press or not is still investigated)

It seems like a moot distinction to me. Take Glock for example; they make a big deal about their guns having "three automatic independently-operating mechanical safeties." But the fact of the matter is a glock has no traditional fire/safe toggle safety. ALL the safety of a glock is based on the premise that the trigger will not be unintentionally pulled when a round is in the chamber. The obvious consequence of this is people getting shot by completely accidental trigger pulls. Whether you drop the gun and it goes off or the trigger snags on your clothing and the gun goes off, a gunshot accident is still a gunshot accident, and both are consequences of the gun's design.

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Glocks are still not unpredictable by my metric. Yes, the margins of safety might be narrower than you’d prefer, but it’s not going to go bang without a trigger press. It’s a very predictable firearm in that way.

That being said the first generation was prone to slam fires, where chambering a round sets the firearm off. Now that is an unpredictable tool.

Also, historically snagging the trigger on clothing has always been a source of negligent discharges, even before Gaston Glock was around. The allied army in WW2 officially required that most soldiers issued a handgun carry it with an empty chamber due to the prevalence of injuries, and the M1911 has a grip and manual safety.

I think you've missed my point,

> Glocks are still not unpredictable by my metric. [...] it’s not going to go bang without a trigger press. It’s a very predictable firearm in that way.

I agree with this completely. Glocks are predictable. Where we part ways is that I don't believe predictability is the metric that should be optimized for. People not getting shot is the important metric; predictability is only important insofar as it relates to that. But as demonstrated by glocks, predictability is not the end-all-be-all when it comes to people not accidentally shooting themselves.

As for soldiers in WWII, they also had piss-poor to non-existent trigger discipline. A 1911 is a safer gun than a glock due to the manual safety, but still won't protect you from handling it in unsafe ways. Glocks have that same problem, but worse because they lack manual safeties which function as one last line of defense when you fuck up everything else.

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