It is a single action in that the hammer is cocked when the slide is actuated and it cannot be fired when the hammer is down, but my God, what a long and hard trigger pull it is when cocked. You need not worry unless you’re already squeezing the trigger as you pull it out of your pocket, in which case shame on you. If you can make your LCP fire without putting some serious deliberate effort into it send it back to Ruger tomorrow because it’s broken.
I was primarily worried about the trigger catching on my clothes as it came out of the holster. You’re right. It is a long trigger pull. They’ve been selling the LCP for at least 6 years. It’s got to be safe or there would be lots and lots of injuries.
I share your dislike of safety catches but I disagree on this point - you shouldn’t be carrying a loaded longarm around with a round up the spout unless you’re ready to fire it, and if you’re about to fire your longarm you don’t need a safety catch.
When I go out hunting with my rifle or shotgun, I always have a round in the chamber. For two reasons: 1) Chambering a round makes too much noise, and might scare the game off. 2) Chambering a round takes too much time and too much manipulation. (It’s bad enough that I have to remember to actuate the safety.)
Perhaps I should clarify my position on external gun safeties.
A long gun (shotgun or rifle) is often carried in your hands and with a round in the chamber for reasons I mentioned in my previous post. As such, the trigger is exposed. Even though you are keeping your finger off the trigger, a twig from a tree (or anything else) can easily get inside the trigger guard and hit the trigger. This is why a long gun must have an external safety.
By contrast, a handgun carried for self defense is carried in a holster, and thus the trigger is not exposed. Nothing can snag the trigger when you’re walking around, therefore there is no logical reason for the handgun to have an external safety. Now some ask, “But… but… but what if my finger accidently touches the trigger when I am handling or drawing the gun?” My answer is that, if you are worried your finger might accidently touch the trigger when you’re not ready to shoot, then you need more training. The gun’s “safety” is between your ears.
I have a CCW, but I do not see any need to carry a firearm. The CCW just makes purchases easier. If I were to carry a gun, I’d probably choose my Walther PPK/S. It’s small and light, so it wouldn’t be a problem to carry. It’s stainless steel, so I wouldn’t have to worry as much about wet weather or sweat. With one in the pipe, it’s a simple matter to flip off the safety when pulling it out. It was good enough for James Bond.
If I wanted to carry a gun, and I was feeling old-timey, I’d carry a Colt 1903. It was good enough for Bogie.
If I didn’t want to leave cases around, a snub-nose S&W 38. 
Not sure if I’m the only one, but what was drilled into my head my whole life was: “Keep your booger-hook off the bang switch.”
Good advice, Johnny L.A.
My advice for picking a CCW:
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Relatively small and lightweight. A .45 ACP might seem more manly, but have you tried carrying one around all day? It’s heavy. And then you’ll inevitably come to the point when you don’t want to carry it, simply because it’s so damn uncomfortable.
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But not too small. A .22LR or .25 won’t reliably stop a BG. The minimum size to look at is .380, IMO.
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Economical to train with. Unless you’re independently wealthy, you’ll want to shy away from expensive and/or exotic rounds like the .45 ACP, 10 mm, and 5.7 X 28 mm. They’re so expensive to shoot that you won’t spend the requisite time to train with them.
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Stainless steel. A CCW will get covered in your sweat, and sweat contains salts and acids.
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If you want to carry a CCW, but do not want to spend a lot of time training with it, get a revolver. If you plan on training with it at least twice a month, get a revolver or semiauto.
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Reputable brand. The CCW should cost at least $400 new.
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Most important: pick a CCW that you enjoy shooting. If you enjoy shooting it, you will practice with it more.
With the above in mind, I carry a S&W M&P 9 mm compact.
We are all familiar with Jeff Cooper’s Four Firearm Safety Rules. But there’s another set of rules I often teach my students:
Unless you’re ready to shoot,
- Keep your finger off the trigger.
- Keep your damn finger off the trigger.
- Keep your damn finger off the damn trigger.
The LCP is labeled “Single strike double action”. Which in my book isn’t double action at all. If the trigger doesn’t cock and fire the hammer, with double strike capability, then they can call it any fancy name they want, but it’s actually single action. There are double action only, second strike pistols out there. I don’t know why Ruger, Kel-Tec, etc. are using this odd single strike configuration.
whenever I read a news story (usually some guy at trial about why he shot someone) and I read “the gun just went off” I immediately say BULLSHIT! Guns don’t just “go off”. The trigger has to be pulled. Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire!
With that said, with some of these super small pistols that can be carried in a pocket sans holster, an external manual safety might be desirable.
With the caveat that anecdotes aren’t data:
Several years ago, I was the youngest guy among a group of about 10 hunters on a lease in south Texas. After a day out hunting white-tail, we were all sitting around the table in the cabin, shooting the shit and going over, mainly, the trophy bucks we’d seen but somehow never shot. You know how it goes.
One of the men had a beautiful new 30/30, lever action.
The gun starts going around the table, from one man to the next. Again, pretty typical. You heft it, shoulder it, get a sense of its balance, what the iron sights look like, etc.
Every single man, including me, opened the bolt and eyeballed the chamber as soon as we were handed the gun. Always a good safety rule to follow. And, even though there’d been 5 or 6 sets of eyeballs verifying the empty chamber, nobody ever swept anyone else with the muzzle. Good so far.
Finally, someone asks to dry fire it to get a sense of the trigger break. Permission given. Guy points the gun in a safe direction, pulls the trigger, and BOOM! It’s the only time I’ve ever heard a 30/30 fired indoors, and of course everyone jumps.
Turns out that the extractor had broken. There’d been a round seated the whole time.
Lesson: don’t just eyeball it–stick your pinky in and verify an empty chamber.
By the way for the OP and anybody else who owns an LCP: Ruger - LCP® Product Safety Warning and Recall Notice
Make sure you get it retrofitted or it could fire when dropped.
Yep, and that’s why there’s redundancy in Cooper’s Four Safety Rules.
I also had an unintentional discharge with a firearm, and *nothing *touched the trigger:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7835959&postcount=194
As someone who has a lot of experience with rifles but whose only experience with pistols is a 357 revolver:
Upon loading a semi-automatic rifle you pull the handle back to strip a round into the chamber and charge the mechanism, upon firing the gas does all of that for you for the following round so all you have to do to fire the next round is a light trigger pull.
Do semi-automatic handguns not all operate like that?
Essentially it’s the same gas-operated concept.
Each manufacturer will do something different for the trigger pull, though, and they all have fancy names for it. Some handguns have a hammer (it can be internal or external) and some have a striker, which is pretty much universally internal, although on my Walther, when the striker is cocked, the rear of it protrudes from the back of the slide so that you can feel with your thumb, in the dark, whether the gun is cocked or not.
In a SA/DA pistol, normally the first round would require a long, heavy, double-action pull of the trigger, but the subsequent rounds would be single-action, since the gas has cycled the slide. That cycle of the slide ‘cocks’ the gun for you. Some pistols will allow you to “decock” with a button or lever, putting it back in double-action.
It’s the same general concept of being able to cock the hammer of a .357 and decock it, except the cocking of the pistol won’t spin the cylinder, since there isn’t one.
ETA: Not sure if it’s a universal thing or just something I was taught, but when I say the word “pistol” I mean exclusively a semi-automatic handgun. A revolver is a revolver.
No, they don’t all operate like that. A Glock, for instance, is a striker-fired handgun with a consistent 5.5 pound trigger pull (with the standard trigger). My Sig P239, however, has a DA/SA system where the first round is a long double action pull and the rest are light single action pulls. A 1911-type is single-action-only and every trigger pull is light.
Everything is different, which is part of the allure of firearms, just as it is with cars or other highly variable mechanical products.
And to add to what Airman Doors is saying about Glocks (which is also true of the Walther P99QA) is that their action is a kinda-sorta hybrid.
The striker is always basically “half cocked,” so that every pull of the trigger is consistent. The trigger pull finishes cocking the striker, then releases it, and the cycle of the slide performs the work of getting back to that “half cocked” position.
The problem, for some, is that if you have a fail-to-fire on these types of actions, the trigger has released the striker but there’s been no cycle of the action to reset the “half cock,” so if you pull the trigger again at this point, nothing happens. You’d have to go through a clearing drill and manually cycle the slide.
SA/DA pistols, or DAO pistols, will cock and release the striker each and every time the trigger is pulled.
That’s what we were talking about above vis-a-vis “second strike.” Can you pull the trigger again and have the hammer/striker hit the primer, without a manual recharge.
So basically on a semi-automatic handgun after loading it you have the choice of whether you want to pull the slide back manually, if you don’t an extra hard pull of the trigger will accomplish the same action?
Is there a type of handgun that operates exactly like a rifle, where the first round requires manual charging, and ever subsequent round is a light pull.
No, the trigger doesn’t affect the slide, only the striker/hammer.
Gas from a discharged round cycles the slide, or you do it manually.
No, you always have to charge the round. That requires a manual actuation of the slide. You can either pull it back through the full length of travel if the action is closed or simply close the action on a loaded magazine. Either way, you have to chamber a round, and in doing so you ready the action.
Yes. Lots of them. The first round ALWAYS requires manual charging, and if a light pull is demanded for all rounds you want a single-action pistol. The defining pistol of this type is the 1911.