What many of you seem to be missing is that the half cock was a safety - until people started discovering that it didn't work well enough and folks were getting killed because a 3 lbs gun will hit rocky ground hard enough to break something and drive the hammer into the primer. So the five shot work around evolved. For rifles, with larger sears and hammers shielded by the stocks, the half cock worked better. And when the first external hammer autos came around, the same problem popped up again, but without the workaround of loading down one round.
Wrong. "Half-cock" IS a safety, but it's not there for a CARRY safety. The "safety position" was the intended carry position. Half cock is there to allow safe loading and unloading of the pistol while not allowing the hammer to fall in the process, which could damage the user and/or the gun, should a loaded cylinder be under the hammer at the time. The user, obviously due to the unintended discharge, and the gun because the cylinder is not in a locked position ensuring the proper alignment of the cylinder with the barrel.
What modern folks forget is that when you hand a cowboy a Mauser 1896 with a full length firing pin, he doesn't look for the safety, but lowers the hammer. JMB was aware of this, and the Army cavalry preferred to carry hammer down like they carried their revolvers, rather than safety on a hammerless pistol like the Luger and other Browning designs. So JMB came up with three innovations to make hammer down carry safer:
1. A decocking helper, built into the grip safety. (And it is a grip safety, but that part has two functions.
A technical side effect is not the same as the design intention. The fact that my passenger car can be used to pull another vehicle out of a ditch does not make it a tow truck.
And how does this feature make "hammer down carry safer"? Answer: "It doesn't".
2. The "sight safety" - essentially a manual firing pin safety that makes the hammer position unimportant.
If by "sight safety" you mean the safety lever on the side of the 1911, then hammer position is, indeed, very much important. You cannot engage this safety with the hammer down. The hammer must be in the half cock or full cock position. If you can engage the safety lever with the hammer down on a 1911, then this is not a condition known as "safe"; it's a condition known as "broken", which is usually also associated with "unsafe" when used as an adjective describing a firearm.
3. The inertial firing pin, which offers the revolutionary ability to decock full down on a loaded chamber.
Awesome. But the Colt SAA does not have this, so it's a moot point in that discussion. And while the inertial firing pin in the 1911 makes it inherently safer, is it not a safety.
Meanwhile, S&W came up with a hammer block system that solved the problem with revolvers, but wasn't applicable to the moving breaches of automatics.
The 1911 has many different types of safeties. (USN Chief ->)The disconnector, which JMB also called a "Safety piece", is an internal safety that prevents out of battery firing. It has a trigger blocking grip safety, a sear blocking manual safety, an inertial firing pin safety and a half cock safety.
So riddle me this, Batman: If the slide is out of battery on the 1911, how does the hammer fall all the way to the firing pin in the first place? The answer is: "It doesn't". The back of the slide itself will obstruct/impede the motion of the hammer.
Does this mean, then, that the slide itself is a "safety"? No, it doesn't.
The clearly stated purpose of the disconnector, in accordance with JMB's words himself, conveniently printed in black on white in the very same patent reference you cited earlier, is to prevent multiple discharges of the gun with a single trigger pull. To prevent "full auto", as it were.
Nowhere in your cited reference did I run across JBM calling the disconnector a "safety piece". Perhaps I missed that, and if so I'd certainly appreciate a citation illustrating this.
A device can be a "safety" without promising to be a carry safety or manual safety. A safety is a safety when it has a feature that prevents the gun firing when it should not.
I can fill a 1911 with epoxy and certainly render the gun "safe". But that's not what a safety is.
I can insert one of those neat little orange thingiewidgets in the breech of a gun to show it's empty and/or prevent the proper mechanical function of the gun. But that's not what a safety is.
I can remove a key component and render a 1911 "safe". That, too, is not what a safety is.
A safety is a device which is specifically intended to be used as such...to be activated and deactivated at will by the operator. Thus a component, such as an inertial firing pin, is NOT a "safety". It is an integral component that functions automatically to make the gun safer, but canot be engaged and disengaged at will.
Like the disconnector or a automatic firing pin block, the half cock serves several passive safety functions, even though it is a leftover from a failed revolver manual safety system. If misused as a manual safety it works as well as it can, but exposed hammer at half cock can never be accident proof without a firing pin block safety.
The "half cock" of the 1911 serves as a specific safety. Says so in black and white in the patent.
The "half cock" of the SAA serves as a specific safety only during loading and unloading operations. It's not intended to be a carry safety because the cylinder is free to rotate while in this position.
Today, the 1911 is a mish-mash of features that don't all make any sense for how Jeff Cooper says we have to use it. As a cocked and locked pistol, the 1911 requires no external hammer, inertial firing pin or decocking hammer/grip safety. But it has all that stuff, and a really nicely made half cock, too. But, 150 years later, we know not to use it.
Seems to me that ANY design which has survived for over a century of common place, every day use in a highly competative market does not qualify as "a mish-mash of features that don't all make any sense".
And apparently only a few people "know not to use" the very robust hammer safety position on a 1911.
