For the life of me, I can't figure out why this discussion keeps popping up.
Now it seems that respected gun-blogger Tam (I'm not a reader) has opined, and that started a chain of responses, including a blogger I DO read every day, PawPaw.
I commented over at PawPaw's, but it seems to me that this is a non-fruit-bearing discussion.
Let's take it one step at a time.
First, all guns are loaded, all the time. That's Rule One, and if you fail to heed it, you WILL have an unintentional discharge, which could be anywhere from embarrassing to fatal, depending only on luck, which you DON'T want to have to depend on.
Second, all of us gun people, as well as the gun manufacturers, can read, and we keep reading about unintentional discharges with bad results. All of us want to stop those issues, so we preach the Four Rules, and we re-preach the Four Rules, etc. Some of us (Joe Huffman is an example), even compose new language for the four rules, but always, THE FOUR RULES.
It doesn't stop there. If we were perfect students, it COULD stop there, but we're not, so it doesn't.
Enter the manufacturers. It doesn't stop there with them, either, thanks to product liability lawsuits, so they HAVE to continue to find ways of improving product to avoid these lawsuits.
Years ago, probably at the dawn of Browning's era, came the Loaded Chamber Indicator for semi-auto pistols. I have an early example, a pre-war Walther PP.
Loaded chamber indicators make sense, not only to help protect manufacturers from lawsuits, not only to protect dummies who can't or won't learn the Four Rules and apply them, but for other reasons as well.
My Walther, being a blowback action, gets dirty. The main way I tell that it is dirty is the Loaded Chamber Indicator, which starts to get sticky. When it starts to get sticky, so does the firing pin in it's channel. Then the pistol needs detailed stripping and cleaning.
That's a bennie of LCIs that no one else seems to have noticed, helping you know when your pistol needs detailed stripping and cleaning.
It's like this, boys and girls: you have a manual safety on your firearm (unless it's a Glock or clone). That safety doesn't need "Safe" and "Fire" designations to function, but most have them. You accept them, right?
'Nuff said. Go with the flow. Find something else to vent about, this isn't a real issue. Nothing to see here, move along.
Capiche?