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Yeah, BAP just seems to be crying about more effecient and higher fit humans taking their rightful place near the top of the western hierarchy. It's literally no different to the usual complaints black people have about whites. BAPs laments come from the same place as those ones (namely envy) and should be discarded. The only difference is that unlike whites who for some reason listen to the unfounded complaints of blacks, we're not going to listen to the ones of whites. You set up this system, and now we're beating you at your own game!
Also this Indian Bronson dude (first time I am hearing of him) has a profile picture of a dude holding up a gun with no trigger discipline. That on its own makes me negatively predisposed to him, people have died because others couldn't keep their index fingers straight. It's something which needs to be shamed and removed from society.
"trigger confidence" is an emerging meme in the gun culture. People turned "trigger discipline" into dogma, and then into cliche, and the fact is that if you are comfortable around guns, having your finger inside the trigger carries no significant risk of an accidental discharge.
Oh man, that’s almost parody. Like something a conspiracy theorist would attribute to Feds. “We need to cull the gun population!”
I like having some cliches on which to fall back. The laws of gun safety are pretty good ones, and they make it way easier to impress the overall strategy on a new shooter. If that’s cringe…then I don’t want to be based.
There's a steelman where establishing 'vital' rules that must necessarily broken on a regular occurrence is counterproductive for all but the dimmest bulbs. Mike Rowe's Safety Third talk is a more generalized version.
Saying that you can't get hurt if you follow these simple rules in every circumstance isn't even strictly true -- ricochet matter! -- but even were it true, it's not very useful, when you have to break those rules on the range, dry-firing, tearing down some guns for cleaning, doing common drills. It's 'okay', because you're only breaking one rule at a time! But while Trigger Discipline ends up being the thing people focus most on because it's so visible in every photo, it's also one that -- as Sig has proven at length -- is particularly awkward for how consistently you have to break it for a variety of situations.
I don't agree with it, myself, still: Cooper's Four Rules are about producing habits, not behaviors. But it's less obviously crazy.
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True under normal circumstances, but in exactly the sort of stressful situation where self-defense might become necessary (e.g. in a building where there's a shooter) I'd expect having your finger inside the trigger guard to indeed risk accidental discharge.
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It's very low cost to have trigger discipline, and very high cost if something does go wrong because you don't. It might be an insignificant risk, but why take the risk at all? If nothing else, the competent people using trigger discipline so the incompetent people follow along too is a good idea. Because I guarantee you if there was a policy of "You're only allowed to have your finger inside the trigger if you're comfortable with guns", you'd see a ton of people who aren't comfortable but want to pretend they are putting their finger inside.
If I were to argue the other side, I think I would start with "because life is irreducibly risky, and it is better to consciously accept that fact than to chase increasingly marginal safety measures. At some point, you need to draw the line and say 'this far and no further'".
Mainly, though, I'm just interested in the evident social dynamics. Status games are really good at eroding norms.
I agree with that to a degree but I think it's all about costs. If I was told that to increase gun safety I should wear a piece of plastic on my finger that may slightly increased safety but caused me significant annoyance(as a made up example), I wouldn't want to, because it wouldn't be worth it. I agree there are lots of things like that where our culture is insisting in ever more costly measures for ever more marginal gains. But keeping fingers out of the trigger feels very low cost with a benefit that's more than marginal.
Interesting comparison: trigger guard safeties. I bought a Garand recently, and putting it on safe entails pulling a metal tab in with your trigger finger. Since this tab is on the front of the trigger guard, taking it off requires the user to put his finger on the trigger, then push out. It’s not something I expect to actually be dangerous, but I can see why it has been unpopular compared to thumb safeties.
I'm actually more surprised that more bones aren't made about the safety on the SKS (or to a lesser extent, the SVT-40, though those aren't exactly common in the US)- you have to sweep the lever down towards and behind the trigger to disengage it and if you do it BAD-(lever)ly enough you could probably fire it with the same finger stroke. Maybe the people who fire their guns accidentally this way probably successfully cover it up since this type of gun can slam fire if you fail to clean a part that takes effort to remove.
I think the second biggest reason thumb safeties aren't popular is just because modular trigger assemblies don't lend themselves to it (the Garand is basically just a purpose-built bolt-action rifle conversion anyway, and with the trigger where it is there's very little room in the action itself for it). Safeties that directly block the hammer from moving are better than those that just disable the trigger, too, so if you can get away with it, why not? (For that matter, the AR-15 can't be put on Safe when the hammer is down, which would probably prevent people from seeing not being able to do that as "unsafe" by itself simply due to being a gun everyone and their dog owns.)
Also, competitive shooting with the meta gun(s) in Production requires you to pull the trigger when you don't intend to shoot to lower the hammer down, all the way, on a live round, on a gun that has no firing pin block- so it'll go bang if you drop it in the right place just like SIG P320s did. It's true that nobody's downrange when you do it, but it's still the most common gun handling thing apart from actually shooting it. The preferred 1911s can also do this, but you're starting those with the safety on so it's much less of an issue.
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I did a bit of small bore shooting during my time at university and we had an hour long lecture when I started about how we MUST MUST not put our finger around the trigger before they would even let us get into a sling. There were plenty of examples in the lecture of things going wrong and the aftermath of these accidents and while I personally don't mind guns (in the hands of the right people of course, I absolutely mind them in the hands of the wrong people) I would not be comfortable around someone holding a loaded gun like that. To me proper trigger discipline is an act of basic courtesy to your fellow shooters signifying you value their safety.
I don't particularly disagree, just pointing out an interesting social pattern. People who do disagree often point to the numerous examples within the firearms pantheon who evidently did not follow the rule rigorously.
What is actually happening, I think, is that it became a low-effort callout, and thus grew associated with people who were evidently in it for social points rather than actual gun safety, and normal social dynamics are doing their thing from there, helped along by the mutual disdain between what one might uncharitably call old-timer "fudds" and the younger Cawladooty crowd. It's interesting to watch the norms shift in real-time.
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