I have a question on the relevancy of half-cocking on modern firearms. I was reading the manual of my firearm(CZ75B) and I saw that my model had a firing pin safety as well as a hammer stop safety.
Seeing as though the hammer safety was clearly visible, I questioned where the other safety was. So I googled and I learned about the firing pin safety.
My question is: Does of the firing pin safety make half-cocking a gun obsolete? Is it safe to carry my gun fully uncocked without fear of it firing from a drop or accidental hammer pull?
In: Engineering
The CZ-75 didn’t have a firing pin lock when it was first designed, which is why they put a half-cock on it.
The half-cock is a weird safety feature in that it often isn’t and half-cocked guns will usually accidentally fire under similar circumstances to what would cause an un-cocked gun to accidentally fire. The firing pin lock is the modern safety feature that is designed to prevent accidental firings as a result of the gun being dropped or otherwise physically shocked.
Is your gun safe to drop? Maybe? The firing pin safety gets weaker with use and has a shock threshold above which it will break, even brand new. Your particular gun may also have a defective firing pin lock that either doesn’t work or fails at a lower threshold than what was intended. The only way you’ll discover that is when you accidentally shoot someone.
As to why your gun still has a half cock – who knows? Again, half-cocking is not modernly viewed as making the gun any safer and may make the gun more dangerous. There are a number of reasons it may have been kept on the gun ranging from it being expensive to retool the machine that makes that part of the gun, to the physical components involved in the mechanism adding strength to some other component of the gun, to the manufacturer thinking that people were just less likely to buy the gun if it didn’t have a half-cock.
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