Upside Downside

Greg Ellifritz has a good piece up on some of the pros and cons of the traditional double-action auto.

"Surprisingly, the dual trigger pulls were not the problem that you might expect them to be. At the time, a lot of the officers had been originally trained on revolvers. The first pull of the TDA auto is quite similar in feel to a double action revolver trigger.

The bigger training issue was managing the TDA auto’s decocking lever. Teaching a student when to decock while the pistol was still in hand was harder than teaching the double action trigger pull. Getting students to remember to decock before holstering while under a lot of stress was hard work. When the stress levels increased, I had lots of cops trying to holster cocked TDA pistols."

I pretty much agree with his observations.

Everything has tradeoffs. If you carry a TDA (or a single-action like a 1911), you need to reliably and habitually activate the decocker (on a TDA) or safety (on an SAO) when you come off the sights, otherwise many potential advantages are lost. This is complicated on TDA autos with non-returning combination safety/decockers; on a S&W like the one in the photo, I flip the lever down to decock the pistol and back up again immediately to ready the pistol for work again. Real proficiency with either TDA or SAO will be higher-maintenance than equivalent skill with a striker-fired auto. 

I still think a light-but-long DAO is the best of both worlds for the non-hobbyist* defensive user, but I've long realized that I’m shouting into the void on this one.

[SARCASM ALERT] The complete necessity of sub-.25 splits in defensive situations has totally poisoned the well for the commercial success of DAO guns. Mrs. Edna Crabapple will not be able to defend herself from felons without a short-travel, sub 5# trigger. [/SARCASM ALERT]

Would you consider yourself unarmed with a DA/SA gun like this Smif 1066? I wouldn't.

*By "non-hobbyist" I mean the typical gun owner, who likely isn't reading this blog and wouldn't list "guns" as one of their hobbies. They keep a gun in the house the same way most people keep a fire extinguisher. However the market does not cater to their needs, because they're generally one-and-done customers, not enthusiastic repeat buyers. The market caters to gun nerds like me and you.