DA/SA vs SFA vs ... -- 2019 Edition

[spinmove_]

If I could find a lightweight TDA pistol that was not pushing 30 oz or more I'd be all over it. But I'd also need a fairly small counterpart to it's big brother. The problem is even if there were a very small TDA pistol that was thin and light weight I wouldn't be able to shoot it very well with a 10 ish # trigger pull. I am super boring and stick to the same line of firearm. Beretta's for TDA and Glocks for SFA. If the Glock SCD didn't exist I would have moved on from a Glock. However I would never feel comfortable with the newer " Glock Killers" of the month. If I had lots of experience with using a thumb safety I'd give an m&p 2.0 a try again. But I'm not willing to retrain myself to defeat a manual safety after drawing. I have to admit though Glocks get boring as hell after awhile.

I think if manufactures would release TDA pistols with awesome triggers right out of the box more people would get on board with them. I have no interest spending $500 on a polymer pistol and then having to spend another $350-500 into a trigger to make it more to my liking. It gets more and more painfully obvious that manufactures think they need to make a SFA polymer pistol to stay in business anymore. Right or wrong, safe or less safe doesn't really make a difference. The demand is for polymer frame SFA pistols.

Training yourself to defeat the thumb safety is way easier than you think and if you’re gripping the pistol correctly there’s a really good chance you wouldn’t even need to “train yourself” to do it.

Manufacturers are churning out polymer SFA pistols left and right because thats what the market demands. They’re cheap, reliable, simple, hold lots of bullets, and some of them even have “almost a 1911 like trigger”. For new people and casuals, compared to a SFA pistol, where’s the allure of a TDA with two trigger presses and extra levers if you’re buying it from Trent the Tacticool Timmy behind the gun counter?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[JHC]

I am unsure why the PPQ has become the poster child for unsafe striker carry pistols? Compared to a Glock, it has a similar weight trigger pull, has more pre-travel than a Glock, but shorter reset. Seems like more pre-travel is a positive, and shorter reset is irrelevant. I am not aware of any instances where the firing pin (striker) block safety in a PPQ has failed.

I don't know either and I am agnostic on the question of which specific pistol is or isn't.

But unrelated to those particulars, since you brought up pre-travel . . .

Pre-travel gets referenced a lot for being a key attribute that makes a trigger relatively "safer" or not safer, irrespective of the weight of said pre-travel or the overall weight effort to fire the pistol.

Often solid references are linked to of scientific studies of trigger movement distance yada yada yada.

IMO pre-travel that has barely any perceptible resistance to is nearly irrelevant to perceiving one pulling the trigger. Especially if one's mind is super focused on a high speed shooting challenge. If I'm prepping a trigger on the way to full index I'm not even noticing any movement because it's resistance is so light. If one was pure trigger slapping - the right way - the way some top shooters do it then that might be different.

There are a couple of fully tensioned SFA pistols that to my senses fall into this category of such light resistance in pre-travel.

[BehindBlueI's]

Training yourself to defeat the thumb safety is way easier than you think and if you’re gripping the pistol correctly there’s a really good chance you wouldn’t even need to “train yourself” to do it.

It wasn't for me. It was easy to get to a very high success rate, and essentially a 100% success rate in static drills. Where it became more problematic was when entangled, when being jerked around by a training partner who was significantly more skilled then me at hand to hand, etc. The "gripping the pistol correctly" part became harder to do, or at least consistently. Real world side, I've had several people fail to fire their gun when they wanted to because they didn't defeat the safety and bad things then happened. I've also had my thumb broken to the point it was useless (bones at the base broke) during a struggle with a suspect.

Personally, I have no use for a manual safety on a handgun. Long guns, fine, it's not a an entangled fight gun. Handguns, not for me.

[spinmove_]

It wasn't for me. It was easy to get to a very high success rate, and essentially a 100% success rate in static drills. Where it became more problematic was when entangled, when being jerked around by a training partner who was significantly more skilled then me at hand to hand, etc. The "gripping the pistol correctly" part became harder to do, or at least consistently. Real world side, I've had several people fail to fire their gun when they wanted to because they didn't defeat the safety and bad things then happened. I've also had my thumb broken to the point it was useless (bones at the base broke) during a struggle with a suspect.

Personally, I have no use for a manual safety on a handgun. Long guns, fine, it's not a an entangled fight gun. Handguns, not for me.

Interesting. Definitely gives perspective that not all hands are created equal. The way I grip a pistol I’d have a hard time NOT disengaging the safety. But I guess that’s me, not you, and YMMV greatly.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[GJM]

I realize it's a chicken/egg thing with many people (especially on the internet), but I highly doubt that Glock marketing preceded Glock engineering.

Certainly they had marketing back then, but it was all focused on selling shovels.

[JHC]

I realize it's a chicken/egg thing with many people (especially on the internet), but I highly doubt that Glock marketing preceded Glock engineering.

Gaston was brilliant or lucky to design the mechanism to be categorized as DAO by the ATF I guess. (I've long understood that was the case, the ATF part.)

[Rex G]

It wasn't for me. It was easy to get to a very high success rate, and essentially a 100% success rate in static drills. Where it became more problematic was when entangled, when being jerked around by a training partner who was significantly more skilled then me at hand to hand, etc. The "gripping the pistol correctly" part became harder to do, or at least consistently. Real world side, I've had several people fail to fire their gun when they wanted to because they didn't defeat the safety and bad things then happened. I've also had my thumb broken to the point it was useless (bones at the base broke) during a struggle with a suspect.

Personally, I have no use for a manual safety on a handgun. Long guns, fine, it's not a an entangled fight gun. Handguns, not for me.

Well-said. I say this as a 1911 user. I have never failed to operate a 1911 thumb safety, when I intended to drop the hammer, but have failed to operate other pistols’ active manual safety devices. This is why, for example, I do not use a Browning Hi-Power for defensive purposes, and if I were to buy a Beretta 92/M9-ish weapon, it will probably be a G version. (A prominently-protruding safety can be accidentally bumped “on,” as well as “off.”) My brain seems hard-wired to operate the thumb safety of a “real” 1911, but not necessarily the thumb safeties of other handguns.

Additionally, with a 1911, and some few other designs, there is the added task of depressing the grip safety a sufficient distance to allow the weapon to fire. An improper grip could happen at the initiation of the draw, or could occur with the weapon in-hand, with a physical struggle, as mentioned by BBI, being a potential cause. (Of course, these same factors work against one’s opponent if the weapon is snatched.)

I reluctantly transitioned from 1911 to Glock in 2002, for duty carry, because the then-mandated Safariland 070 required releasing the retention devices before attaining a proper grip with the weapon hand, with the weapon hand in a chicken-winged position. During quals, and training prior to 2002, this had not been seen as anything worse than an annoyance, but with my employer’s move back to patrol rifles, in the wake of the terrorist attack in September 2001, I was having failures to operate the grip safety during full-speed rifle-to-handgun transition exercises. (The age- and nerve-damage-related thinning of my skinny, boney hands may have contributed; less “meat” to interface with the grip safety.)

Notably, these failures to operate the grip safety occurred with pistols having a subtle extension, to facilitate depressing the grip safety. Installing grip safeties with prominent “speed bumps” would have helped, but I did not want to operate that close to the margin. The hardware problem was a holster, designed for a specific purpose, that made attaining a proper grip problematic. (In my opinion, the Safariland SSIII/070 is a very good revolver holster, but a poorly-designed* auto-pistol holster, at least for many autopistols, and yes, I know the legendary Bill Rogers designed the thing.) The work-around was to use a pistol that was more-forgiving of being improperly gripped. (Bill Rogers redeemed himself by designing the Safariland ALS/SLS series of holsters.)

Notably, I was able to qual with 1911 pistols again in 2016, when my outgoing chief added the 1911 to the list of approved duty pistols. The Safariland 6360 being the authorized duty rig, by then, meant that attaining a proper firing grip was not a problem. Even so, the necessity of MAINTAINING the proper firing grip remains vital.

[10mmfanboy]

I wish all bad guys would carry j frames so then I could carry a j frame and not feel out gunned. That would be my utopia.

[Bucky]

I wish all bad guys would carry j frames so then I could carry a j frame and not feel out gunned. That would be my utopia.

Well, you’d still need them to attack in groups of 1, 2 at the most.

[MGW]

I wish all bad guys would carry j frames so then I could carry a j frame and not feel out gunned. That would be my utopia.

Just carry multiple j frames.