re: Massad Ayoob makes a case for carrying with safety...

From a PURELY SELF-DEFENSE perspective, it's really difficult to justify having an external safety on a handgun. I see all the comments that say, "Oh, it only takes a fraction of second to flip the safety lever." These people aren't considering the possibility of grappling for your gun, and having the safety accidentally manipulated during the struggle.

If you regain control (with training there's little reason to lose your gun to an attacker), and if you try to shoot assuming (erroneously) that the safety is "off", the time factor for assessing why the gun won't shoot becomes much bigger than a fraction of a second.

The bigger, more realistic issue is forgetting to flip the external safety "off." Go to any local IDPA or USPSA match and watch the guys who are shooting their first competition. I guarantee that the of the ones with an external safety, a third of them will forget to disengage the safety on one or more stages. This is due to nervousness, and having a gang of competitors watching, while the electronic stopwatch is recoding their time.

If someone isn't comfortable carrying a handgun that doesn't have an external safety, they should definitely get a gun that has one. But when we discuss this in my classes, and when people realize that their holster is another form of external safety (since any good holster covers the trigger), they are suddenly much more comfortable carrying a pistol that only has internal safeties.