I work with the safety on. I ride the safety with my trigger finger - my 1301 and 870s all have the safety buttons reversed. Also, in my classes, I strongly encourage the use of the safety.
Do the same with an AR and have a preference for handguns with frame-mounted safeties as well.
eta: I came up under instructors who taught using the safety.
Last edited by Erick Gelhaus; 05-19-2021 at 11:40 PM.
I always rode the safety of an 870 or Benelli with my index finger while moving. The shotguns I have with safeties in front of the trigger guard are for hunting, clays, or nostalgia.
"Gunfighting is a thinking man's game. So we might want to bring thinking back into it."-MDFA
Beware of my temper, and the dog that I've found...
Hunting, shooting matches, and at home - I use the safety just like a carbine or pistol. Off target, on safe. My cruiser ready for a Mossberg 590 is safety on and action locked closed. An unlocked slide is ready to shuck a shell in the chamber and a disengaged safety is ready to fire. Both of those conditions strike me as stupid in a gun being retrieved from storage, particularly by a stressed, rushed, and likely fatigued individual. Going further, I keep up with a habit I picked up while hunting and actively put thumb-finger pressure on the safety, riding it ON. Ithaca 37s have a light and easy to bump safety so it only took a couple moments finding it disengaged to build the habit. This has proven oddly helpful with my 590 as it forces me to have the gun indexed in a way I can easily and immediately disengage the safety. As much as I love tang safeties, they can get awkward in positional shooting where the grip may have your thumb just out of reach.
One of the few good things Pro-Mag ever made is an enlarged safety slider with pronounced ledge. I have one on my 590 with the ledge placed proximal to the wrist of the stock.
Shotguns spew a massive volume of hate and destruction in the blink of an eye. I'm stacking my odds against a negligent discharge in an occupied dwelling.
Serious injuries from breaching with shotguns have happened quite a bit. Not so much from the breaching part but from the process of slinging a breaching gun and going back to a fighting gun. SOP's of not running the action after firing the breaching round (leaving the empty shell in the chamber) and not using extended safeties like the Vang Comp that are easily knocked off when throwing around a breaching gun evolved from that.Originally Posted by ASH556
SOP's from the breaching use of a shotgun have good reason to exist, but especially the bit about leaving an empty shell in the gun until you need to fire the next round are counterproductive in defensive use of the gun.
Shotguns get used for all manner of things from opening doors to launching less-lethals. As a result we end up with a bizarre array of use cases and SOPs that make sense for those use cases and it can muddy the water a bit.
3/15/2016
Safety SOP's on shotguns vary because safeties on shotguns vary so much.
The 870 is behind the trigger guard. So if you run safety on, you can have your trigger finger crooked on top of the safety at all times and you're not likely to end up on the trigger unintentionally from that position, IMO.
The 500/590 from Mossberg has the safety on top of the receiver, which is nice. Your trigger finger just does trigger finger things and doesn't screw around with safeties so you can more easily run safety-on. In fact, as the gun gets some wear on it, you will most definitely want to get some practice removing that safety because it eventually wears to the point where the safety spontaneously engages as you work the action. (Armorer support? What's that?)
On the Winchester/FN guns and the Berettas, the safety is in front of the trigger guard. It's logical at first, but running with one's finger on top of the safety can very easily result in a startle-style response that depresses the safety and lands on the trigger, so I'm really not fond of doing that.
In class I tell people what I do and why and give them the tools to make a risk analysis for themselves to determine what their SOP is going to be.
The typical citizen defender has the gun in their hands for a lot less time than the typical police officer.
Both have a lot less training time behind the gun than we'd like to see for people who are going to use one under a lot of stress. And they likely have far more time on another platform that probably works different and SOP's designed to work more like another gun they have more training time with is a pretty good strategy to give a reasonable shot that they'll remember what to do when under life or death stress.
I don't think there's a right or wrong way to approach the topic from an instructional standpoint. I can make good arguments for any approach to it.
Ultimately the safety isn't the foundation of safe, responsible use of the firearm. It's a supplement to real-world application of the four rules. Our primary safety is teaching people to handle the firearm with attention and intention, and teaching them to do the safest, sanest thing they can with the gun at any given moment in time. Taking some time to walk them through what that looks like in the real world, framing how they think about the problem is crucial, especially at the foundational levels.
I've had plenty of people walk away from the Home Defense Shotgun course doing it just the way I do it. I've had others decide they really want to use the safety. I'm down for someone making an intelligent, informed decision for themselves based on their understanding of the problem, their physiology, and their equipment.
3/15/2016
I've never "searched" with my shotgun. I don't really "search" with any gun, for that matter. I *do* from time to time get my G19 with X300 out of the bedside safe and "go see what that noise was!"
When I have gotten the shotgun out in the past, it's been when I was pretty sure there was a problem. This has happened maybe 2 or 3 times in my 25+ years of owning a shotgun for home defense. Maybe 5.
For me, the shotgun is the "hunker down, shit's getting real" gun. In part because of some of these issues covered above, in part because of the challenges presented with walking around, or outside, the house with any long gun.
In those instances, I haven't even chambered a round. I've been relatively barricaded, with a high degree of confidence in my ability to cycle the pump before I need to shoot.
however, I'm reading this thread with interest because my wife is expressing interest in a shotgun for home defense, and I'm mulling over how I want to approach some of these issues with her.
Does the above offend? If you have paid to be here, you can click here to put it in context.
Pat McNamara’s video on that very question
Just a dog chauffeur that used to hold the dumb end of the leash.
That’s exactly how we ran our breaching shotguns. Empty chamber initially or fired hull in the chamber. When you got the call for a breach and you were in position you racked the action, fired the round, and did not rack.
Just a dog chauffeur that used to hold the dumb end of the leash.
In response to the OP I run safety on as I search, finger on the safety, and disengage if it I need to fire. At one time I did a lot of quail hunting and working the safest was second nature.
Just a dog chauffeur that used to hold the dumb end of the leash.
I would posit that a shotgun is not an AR-15 carbine in terms of the mechanical safety placement, mechanics, and ergonomics. I do what I first learned from Tom Givens, largely because it makes the most sense to me. If the gun isn’t in my hands (slung, in a safe, in a rack, etc.), safety on. When I pick it up, safety off. I do have the VCS dome safety on my 870’s, mainly as an insurance policy, but I also don’t rely on my shotguns for anything other than home defense and being retrieved out of a quick access safe. If I had to contend with carrying the guns loaded and slung, then that changes the equation. But to the OP’s question, if I had to search my home at the risk of using my shotgun in anger, the safety would be off.
Reply With Quote