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PaperclipPerfector  15hr ago (text post)   641 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 25, 2026

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Revolvers and guns with exposed hammers are more dangerous because the hammer on the back, when cocked, makes the trigger pull light enough for any infant to use- so if you're investigating the device like a very small child might and are properly fuzz-testing the controls, a 3 year old could easily fire it.

I think you might be right about that, and I hadn't considered it. Seems like the vast majority of those incidents involving children of those ages involve a DA/SA pistol or an SAO pistol. I really am only thinking of this because I own a few guns and having a future offspring shoot themselves with one is terrifying to me, but I also don't want to leave them all completely inaccessible.

My own father kept loaded guns around the house, but I don't recall any safety scares whatsoever... The two semi-auto rifles I can remember were both suspended higher than a toddler could feasibly reach, I think the pistol was stored in disguised Bible case in a drawer. You generally don't keep a round in the chamber on rifles anyway, though. I remember being told not to touch any of them because they were dangerous, but that would have probably been around when I was 6 or so, on account of my being able to remember it at all.

I remember being told not to touch any of them because they were dangerous

This is the thing I can't properly parse yet- where being able to obey "don't touch, that's dangerous" doesn't necessarily imply "now that you, without questioning or arguing, accept "it's dangerous", you may now know why it's dangerous" (and move on to that stage where you blow up a bunch of soda jugs and watermelons). Then again, I don't have kids yet.

You do a lot of staring down the metaphorical barrel with this stuff and it's odd nobody ever fully acknowledges that. Because yes, them being motivated enough to get to the gun and using it is always a risk. Doubly so because it is a technological terror of a mechanism not found in nature; we don't do that calculus with knives or rope since they're everyday items yet have to consciously do it with guns (I believe hanging ends more kids with a death wish than guns do even when they are available, but I honestly don't feel like verifying that).

It just occurs to me that maybe accidents were more common when the physically smaller guns were the standard home-defense fare simply because they were guns perfectly sized for a kid to use in the first place (and hence more closely resembled the size and weight of their toys at the time). Yeah, revolver triggers are really heavy in DA, and a shrouded-hammer DAO design might be safer because of that, but if my hands are that size I can see me getting enough of a grip on the gun to be able to yank the trigger hard enough to fire it. (With an exposed hammer, I could use my entire hand or some other object to push the hammer down if it's too stiff for my thumb.)

That said, those exact firearms are arguably ideal for actually teaching a kid to shoot. I'd rather give them a pawn shop .32 than a full-size handgun or even a .22 rifle simply because it's not this boat anchor of a thing... which inevitably lends itself to said kid (who is indeed paying attention) getting dope-slapped unnecessarily because they're using so much of their strength to hold the damn thing up in the first place that they can't pull the charging handle back without the gun tracking off to the side. The adult does not know they probably should have told the kid to do this because they're inherently strong/tall enough to never have needed to do that.

Of course I think the real correct choice for this application is a vz. 61 Skorpion (with the shoulder stock) simply because it's harder for that to point the wrong way and easier to actually use, provided you also put one of the really big charging handles on it. But that's also an order of magnitude more expensive than "coincidentally child-sized old revolver" and it's not as simple a manual of arms as "finger off trigger, break it open, loose rounds in, double check finger off trigger, grab cylinder area and close it up, left hand back on grip, [cock hammer and] shoot", so...

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