[Theohazard]

First and foremost, there is no "luxury of practicing unsafe gun handling techniques", you either do it right, or youre going to have problems.

That's not true at all. There are plenty of gun owners out there who are completely unsafe with their weapons, but they get away with it for a while with nothing bad happening. I see it every day. Maybe they get lucky. Maybe they always keep their guns on safe. For whatever the reason, they haven't had a ND and shot themselves or anyone else yet.

If youre counting on that safety to keep you safe while you put your finger on the trigger, youre just asking for serious trouble.

Exactly! That's my whole point right there. This is the very reason why I think that sometimes (note I didn't say "always") a manual safety can make someone less safe; unsafe people often count on it to make the gun safe to handle.

Safety rules are safety rules, you either follow them, or you dont. What type safety the gun might have, means nothing.

That's true for people like you and me where safety has been engrained in us for decades. But not necessarily for someone with no training who has had it engrained in them by popular culture to put their finger on the trigger the moment they pick up a gun.

Its far easier to teach someone that if the gun is in their hand, the safety should be off (assuming the gun has one), and if they touch the trigger, the gun will go off. Why instill bad habits?

Of course that's what they should be taught. But how fast they retain the information is a different story. It's hard to teach someone to keep their finger off the trigger when they've done it (or seen it done) differently their whole lives. And I've found it easier to teach this on a weapon like the Glock that has no safety.

I agree that the rules are the rules and they should be followed the same way no matter what. But I'm talking about new shooters or people who have been gun owners all their lives who never learned basic safety. Untraining bad habits is a process, it doesn't happen immediately. And the design of the gun can make a difference in the mind of someone who practices unsafe gun handling.