Air Force unit suspends use of Sig Sauer pistol after shooting death of airman

And many wouldn't.

> A lot is feasible if your life is at stake.

I won't argue the point - people have different opinions on this, and it's not a topic you're going to get a "clear correct" answer for. The point still stands: Some people choose not to leave, and then their options become limited. They often have to live the rest of their life in fear, and not everyone can get a new identity.[0]

Also, as I and others have pointed out - just the mere fact that you have a gun, are trained to use it well, and keep it on/near you at all times will deter a significant percentage of problematic people.

The other thing to point out - this thread is filled with the extremes (including my examples). It's not always the case that someone has planned to kill someone. There is a continuum of threats.

BTW, try living in the rural[1] parts of my state, where everyone has a gun, and the police funding is low, and often the 911 operator will tell people "Sorry, we're out of resources and it'll take at least 30-60 minutes to get to you. Do what you can to defend yourself"[2] People routinely take advantage of the fact that the police will not get there in time, and not having a gun is inviting such folks.

[0] A coworker's father recently passed away. When it happened, he revealed to me that he had lived much of his life in fear that his father would show up at the door with a gun and shoot him. Even when he lived in a different state. Not exaggerating to say he was relieved when he died. Weirdly enough, he got a gun only after his father died.

[1] And by rural, I still mean a proper city where you have neighbors next to you, etc.

[2] Paraphrasing an actual 911 call.

There's really 2 different things here:

Firstly, there's "How many things are between my finger on the trigger and shooting the gun". The furthest you get is not having a round in the chamber, where you have to pull back and release the slide to chamber a round. In that state, basically nothing you do to the trigger or any other part of the gun will result in a discharge. You could use the gun to hammer a nail into a board and it would be really inefficient but also not result in you shooting anybody. From there, you can have a round in the chamber but the safety on. Some guns have no safety. Some guns have more than one (a common combination is a toggle safety and then a bar built into the trigger that must be pulled first before the trigger can be pulled). The safety's job is to stop the gun from slamming the firing pin into the back of the round. All of this matters a lot for the kind of issues that were common with Serpa holsters, where users tended to slide their finger along near the trigger and were accidentally pulling it as part of their draw from the holster.

Secondly, there's "is there anything stopping the firing pin from just smacking the round and firing it w/o the trigger or anything else being involved". In some guns, the firing pin is physically blocked from striking the round until the trigger is pulled back: there's a piece of metal or other impediment that's in the way, and when you pull the trigger it slides out of the way and then the mechanism pushes the firing pin forward. But in other guns, that isn't the case: the firing pin is held away from the round by some style of tension, but isn't physically blocked. On those guns, if you have a round in the chamber and you whack the gun in the wrong direction, the firing pin can push into the round and fire it. Sig's prior claims were that this was not possible on the P320. Evidence suggests that they are incorrect.

Glocks are the most common among law enforcement in the US these days. The FBI's service pistol is a Glock 19M. Glock claims that the Glock 22 is, "by far the most popular police service pistol in the United States," which surprises me because the 17 and 19 are the service handguns at most big cities, AFAIK.