Trigger Tab Safeties

We're gonna take a very close look at tab safeties on modern triggers. And what you're gonna see here is this one is highlighted in red from Canik on this MC-9 LS. And that's why we're gonna use this one first as the demonstrator. Now all of these firearms have been cleared. I'll double check this one real quick.

What we're looking at here is a subpart of the trigger that moves independently of the trigger itself, and if you're not disengaging that safety if you only were to hit the side of the trigger, it will not go back far enough to actually discharge the firearm, and that was what most people believed was the only purpose of the tab safety, or what some people call the dongle safety on modern striker-fired guns, since they became popular, really in the 90s. But going back into the modern contemporary designs, if you will, in the 80s, we first started seeing a lot of these tab safeties. Now historically, we did not see that extra dongle or tab on safeties of firearms. And mostly, now this is a revolver obviously, but even the double-action, single-action things like your third-generation Smith & Wesson guns, um, your Ruger P85 or P90 guns, I'd say the Smith & Wesson guns like the Beretta 92 would be another example. SIG P220 series would be an example of guns that were both double action and single action, and that meant when the hammer was down, of course this one's clear also, when the hammer is down and you start to pull the trigger, that trigger does two things.

It cocks the hammer and then eventually it releases the hammer, and with many of those designs you could cock the hammer independently and end up with a single-action trigger. With the revolver, you don't get a decocker but with most of the modern designs you would get a decocker with the single-action and double-action combo semi-automatic pistols. Well, these triggers, because they have a lot of work to do, and generally a heavy 8 plus pounds, some of them going up to 12-pound trigger pulls, we don't have to worry about an inertial discharge, and that's actually the sort of secret, I guess, for a long time engineering reason that most modern striker-fired guns have these tab safeties. So yes, there is the chance that if something were to incidentally hit the edge of this trigger, or if you were to snag the edge of the trigger going back to the holster on clothing, or anything else, if you were to just hit the edge of this gun, or the edge of the trigger on this gun, then the gun will not discharge. Now if I go all the way in and.

To snag something incidentally or somewhere to grab the gun and hit the tab safety to press it and pull the trigger. You heard that click, that was the striker being dropped, and because it doesn't take much travel, it doesn't take much movement, and there generally is no external manual safety lever on these modern guns. The status quo, the best practice, the standard design of a gun in the modern era, striker fired gun is to have that tab safety. But what do I mean by inertial safety? Well, we think about a gun falling onto the back end of the gun.

Anything that isn't the actual piece of the gun that strikes the ground, whether it's the frame or the slide, anything independent of that, let's say the magazine, which is held in by a latch, but it's really a separate piece, it still has its own momentum, and inertia is going to cause it, if there's any front to back movement when this gun strikes the ground this way, the magazine would shift back, and it might be, you know, a couple of thousandths of an inch, but it would shift backwards. Similarly, the trigger, because it is suspended by springs, is an independent unit from the frame of the gun. Certainly it's different; it's independent from the slide of the gun. So what's gonna happen is you've got some friction obviously between some portion of what the trigger's touching. Traditionally it's gonna be an extended trigger bar and the striker, and you've got the energy, the power of the springs holding that trigger in place to some extent, but there's still gonna be some inertia from the mass of the trigger shoe, particularly itself, this end, the part that you touch.

So as the gun goes down, that trigger is going to want to continue moving backwards independent of the frame when the frame stops, and if the trigger has enough momentum, if there's enough inertial effect, it could actually discharge the gun, but with the tab safety design, that is prevented from happening, and I think it's fair to say that the vast majority, if not really all consumers when these tab safeties or dongle safeties first appeared on the market really didn't understand that purpose that it was being served by that safety. When we go back and look at some other designs that have come out in the last decade, particularly the SIG P320 and 365 as seen here, you'll notice that there is an absence of a tab safety, and SIG decided that the consumers wanted a flat face trigger. They wanted more of an old school type trigger, and that they preferred that to the dongle. And what they've decided is that with this The design there has as little mass as possible in the 365 and with the 320, it's important to note that. They did go back and change the design of the trigger itself.

If you look at some very early 320 trigger shoes, they were larger and heavier. They had more mass than the modern version, the contemporary version that was done very early in the manufacturing cycle of the SIG 320. So what you see here is a trigger that they believe has so little mass that there will not be an inertial effect when the gun drops on its back end. There is not enough mass here to create an inertial discharge. With this trigger design, but it's missing the tab safety, so you don't get that secondary feature that I count myself as one of the people who thought was actually the primary feature of what we'll call the snag safety aspect of the tab.

Why is this important to talk about? Well, one, it's just important to know why the parts of the gun are the parts of the gun, why things are designed the way they're designed, and understanding that those tab safeties serve two purposes may make you feel like, okay, that the design doesn't. make, uh, it's not a complete aberration. I think a lot of people look at this and say, well, gee, it doesn't have a tab safety, that's really lacking. Why would I do that?

Well, thinking of this as a drop safety, as an inertial safety for when the gun falls on its back end, or when you're wearing the gun and you were to fall backwards changes that aspect of that and lets you know, okay, they haven't just left that off arbitrarily without thinking it through. The same thing can be looked at with this design. Now, this is the Canic Prime. It's a 9 millimeter carry handgun. This is actually their first gun made in the.

It's not their first gun with a large pad as their tab safety. The rival, the Meta SFX rival, the larger size, all the bells and whistles gun that they came out with a few years ago, also has a large pad on the front of the trigger, and some people have looked at this and said, well, gee, they're kind of defeating the purpose of having a tab safety because you can still, if anything was going to hit the trigger, it would almost certainly hit that pad as well because it's not the slim tab that we're used to in the traditional design, but when we remember the primary reason for the tab safety is actually an inertial safety for when the gun drops onto the back side of itself. We don't want to have that inertial discharge. This pad will still protect from that inertial discharge, and that's the primary reason for having the tab safety. Also, you can see that if something were to engage the top of the trigger where it's gonna have more potential leverage and is gonna be able to discharge that.

As you're going back into a holster, it still will not go off because the pad has not been depressed, much like the original tab design. So hopefully in this video you've learned a little something about the tab safeties, why they're there, the fact that some designs have two safeties, the snag safety and the inertial safeties. Some primarily just work on the inertial safety, which is the engineering reason for having it, and some guns are designed with a trigger shoe that is so light that we're not worried about inertial discharges.