Why pistol's with external hammers ONLY
Instead of drifting another thread into left field, I started this one.
It has been stated someone will only own pistols with external hammers because they are safer and give the user the ability to second strike a round that didn't initially fire.
I say, this is complete horse dung.
If I'm going to render an opinion, I'll also give my bona fides: 20 years and 9 months of AD Air Force, the last 10 1/2 as an OSI Federal Agent. In Jan 09, I returned from my second tour in Iraq where I completed over 40 successful combat missions. I completed the required combat shooting training throughout my AF career to include the only AF combat shooting course authorized to teach break-contact and peel-off drills with live fire. I have been shooting competitively off and on since I was 11 years old. I have shot USPSA for 3 years now and am an A class shooter. IN the last three years I have averaged 20k-30k rounds of ammo through pistols in competition and for work.
It's this simple, a hammer on a handgun is absolutely NOT necessary. If the gun fails to fire, 99% of the time it's the mag or the ammo. Tap, rack, back on target, squeeze the trigger. Nowhere in this is there recock the hammer and give the potentially bad round another try. I haven't even heard of any professional firearms instructors or the military teaching a technique where trying to refire a potentially bad round in a pistol after it has failed. It simply is too slow and too riddled with repeating a FTF.
...external hammers are inherently more safer firearms, uh... no. The only thing that makes any pistol more safe is keeping your booger picker off the boom lever until the apropriate time. In fact, over the last three years I've seen more firearms with external hammers have neglegent discharges than those pistols without external hammers. Why? Because the trigger pull on a single actioned pistol with the hammer cocked has a shorter and lighter trigger pull. Even then, the ND was NOT the pistol's fault. We are back to that booger picker thing again.
...external hammered pistols are more mechanically sound. Not really. I have seen firing pins and strikers break and stick in all kinds of guns. It's always the result of lack of [FONT='Calibri','sans-serif']maintenance and cleaning. That's an issue with the thing that the booger picker is attached to, not one pistol design or another. Yes, stuff breaks in guns. I will say I have seen DAO guns go auto because of over aggressive trigger tuning or broken parts. This seems to happen more with the DAO's than the hammer guns. It's always been because of a broken part or inexperienced homemade trigger tuning. Any pistol will go auto if the stars align and firing pin sticks out. [/FONT]
Why is an external hammer absolutely necessary? It's not, but the different mechanics it renders in the firearm may be preferable by a shooter over a firearm without an external hammer because of difference in trigger pull. A 1911/2011 single action firearm trigger pull can be tuned to amazing clarity. CZ-75's (et al) can be tuned to an almost equal SA trigger pull after getting around an initial DA trigger pull. Quite a few shooters prefer this trade off when compared to the DAO striker fired firearm's trigger pull.
Esternal hammered pistols are more accurate. [ROFL1] Look up Dave Sevigny. http://teamglock.com/dsbio.htm Enough said.
So, any opinion that a pistol MUST have an external hammer to be accurate, safe, or better is just hogwash. Any reasoning other than you prefer the trigger mechanics over the other is simply delusional and propagating erroneous information. Even the US military has figured this out. The most recent contract specifications for a pistol were the defunct attempt of the Joint Combined Pistol (JCP) The contract was attempted, and shot down by lack of Congressional funding. Look it up and read it. There were specs for pistols with and without external hammers.
