ELi5: In a wild west movie or game, when a gunslinger puts their revolver into their holster it often makes a “click”. (for example in Red Dead Redemption 2). Would this happen in real life, and if so, what is it caused by?

Question

ELi5: In a wild west movie or game, when a gunslinger puts their revolver into their holster it often makes a “click”. (for example in Red Dead Redemption 2). Would this happen in real life, and if so, what is it caused by?

In: 19

Answer 1

The movies and games use a lot of sound effects which does not match the actions. So in general you can not rely on those sounds being correct. But this could be potentially done, but unlikely. This have to do with how old revolvers worked. They were usually double action, in order to fire you had to do two things. First you would pull back the hammer to cock it and then you could pull the trigger. Even more modern single action revolvers would have a lighter trigger pull if you cocked the hammer first. So you would typically have the hammer cocked if you were prepared to immediately fire the gun. When you would put the gun back into your holster you would typically decock the hammer which would make a clicking sound. This is so that the gun does not accidentally trigger if you for example fall off your horse or similar.

The reason this does not make sense though is that if you decock an old revolver the hammer would be resting on the primer of the cartridge. So if you fell off your horse or similar then you could equally well hit the hammer and fire the gun anyway. The correct way to carry such a revolver was to have an empty chamber where you could safely rest the hammer. Some very early revolvers did allow the hammer to rest between the chambers. But in any case you would have to not only decock the hammer but also align the chambers to the correct position. So this was a two hand operation that would make more noise then just a single click.

Later revolvers did come with safeties so that the hammer could not hit the primer without someone holding down the trigger. But this was after you had single action revolvers that could easily be fired without cocking first and it was also very late for the wild west. But a modern “wild west” revolver would have this safety so it could be safely holstered with one hand after having been cocked.