“There are two types of gun owners: those who have had an accidental discharge, or those who are prime candidates.”
There is a fool proof method for ensuring that a firearm is completely safe and can never unintentionally go off under any circumstances. Just follow these simple steps:
1. Completely unload your gun, checking the chamber no less than 20 times for a round.
2. Take the ammunition, lock it in a box, throw the key away, and throw the ammunition off of a bridge into a lake.
3. Completely take your weapon apart piece by piece until it is 100% disassembled in every way imaginable.
4. Hide each of these pieces around your house (with some of them preferably at an out-of-state relative’s home).
Okay, I’m being a bit of a smart-ass, but that method does raise an important point in firearms safety that we are going to focus on. How safe is too safe? Where is the balance between readiness and safety?
The 4 Cardinal Rules of Gun Safety
1. Every firearm is always loaded, even if it isn’t.
2. Never allow the muzzle of the firearm to point at anything you are not willing to DESTROY.
3. Be certain of your target and what’s beyond it.
4. NEVER EVER put your finger on the trigger until you are on target and ready to fire the weapon.
When you hear about “accidental” gun discharges in the news, what they mean to say is that those discharges are negligent. They were caused by an error in the handling of a gun. Modern firearms do NOT just go-off by themselves. In the rare circumstances that they do, those guns are immediately recalled to the factory to be repaired or replaced. In just about every case of an accidental death by firearm, one of these rules has been broken. The rules must be followed at all times, without exception. It does not matter if a gun is “unloaded” (please refer to rule #1), if there is a trigger lock, if its being shown to you by a firearm salesman, etc. Realize that the most important safety for any gun is the one that is in-between your ears.
The reason that so much emphasis is placed on each of these rules is that they are controlled by the person handling the gun. Mechanical safeties can and will fail and an unloaded gun (you aren’t going to go to a gunfight with an unloaded gun are you?) is more useful as a paperweight. Safeties are never a replacement for the 4 rules. This concept is very important because most handguns do not have manually-operated safeties.
SERIOUSLY?
Seriously. All Glocks, most Smith and Wesson M&Ps, the vast majority of Sig Sauers, the majority of H&Ks, all Kahrs, and virtually every revolver ever made, come without a manual safety that can be turned on or off by the user. That is not to say that these firearms don’t have safety features built into them. They actually have very effective safety features that prevent the firearm from going off after being dropped, struck, the trigger being side-swiped, etc. We’ll cover the individual safety features of different firearms and what makes them safe to carry later. What you need to know now is that if you pull the trigger, expect the gun to fire.
We’ll put the rules of gun safety into context later after we cover a few more firearms basics that you’ll want to know when shopping around or testing out guns.
The Handgun Guide 