Drop Safe

 Dropping a handgun is bad juju. We all remember the old Colt SAA, where if you loaded all six chambers, the gun was demonstrably unsafe because the firing pin was resting on a live primer.  There were ways to get around that, the most common being to load only five chambers and letting the hammer rest on an empty chamber. Very safe.

The original 1911 had an inertial firing pin but if dropped directly on the muzzle on a live cargridge, the gun could fire when dropped.  Having an empty chamber kinda-sorta negated the idea of a semiauto, so in the 70s, Colt introduced the Series 70 which had a firing pin block to lock th firing pin until the trigger was pulled. The engineering on how to do that is well known and the patents have expired.

Other manufacturers have other ways to skin that cat.  The Glock dingus on the trigger, the Savage Accutrigger,  are other ways to deep us safe.  This is not rocket science.

I spend a lot of time shooting Cowboy Fast Draw, using Ruger single actions and Colt reproductions to play a shooting game. Occasionally a shooter will drop his or her revolver and we have a procedure for that eventuality. The shooter cannot retrieve his own dropped handgun. The gun must be retrieved and made safe by a match official.  It's a process, but invariably, when the gun comes to rest, it is cocked and pointed toward the fringe line. Again, there is a process for making the gun safe, but the one thing that you never see is that the gun fired during the drop or impact with the ground. I've never seen one fire when it hits the ground.

Odd, isn't it?  It must have something to do with the trigger geometry.

Even though we use safety ammunition, we still consider a dropped gun to be a safety violation. If you drop the gun once, you lose that round.  If you drop it twice, you are disqualified.  But I've never seen one fire when it hits the ground.