[Webleymkv]

It’s funny in a way that I among others can admit that lock failures are rare and it does not really bother us if one carries and ILS gun yet many yourself included feel the need to argue to opposite here to the extreme.

What's funny is that I, very early in this thread, said that I don't take issue with those who dislike the lock for reasons of personal preference. I only take issue with those who claim that the lock is a significant compromise in reliability because that simply isn't true. It was you that chose to take issue with the notion that the lock does not represent a statistically significant reliability compromise and when I showed you, mathematically, that my statement was true, you now choose to tell me that I'm argumentative. Seems like a case of the pot calling the kettle black to me.

First off in response to your point about S+W ejector rods unscrewing, I can tell you that personally, I would agree with you, in an absolute sense the ruger design is a "better" design as it can not back out and lock up the gun. In addition I do not know many engineers who would disagree with me. In absolute terms one should always design a devise to fail in the most benign way possible, in that sense the smith ejector rod as designed / manufactured is some manner of a poor idea.

You're missing my point. The point is that many, if not most, of the people who decry the lock as "one more thing to go wrong" are perfectly willing to take the risk of the ejector rod backing out on pre-lock revolvers even though there are other designs available which negate that risk as well. If even an extremely remote chance of failure, such as the ILS represents, is reason for these people not to carry a particular revolver, then why are they not carrying revolvers of arguably simpler and less trouble-prone design?

Second I am not reviewing and arguing auto lock cases with you, you seem interested in minimizing the number of failures for your own reasons, I will leave it at that.

How am I minimizing the number of failures? I honestly gave you the only two documented cases that I'm aware of and invited you to enlighten me with others if you knew of them. Not only that, I intentionally ran calculations with ridiculously high estimates of failure. As I said before, math is math and even with the extremely high failure estimates I used, the failure rate still comes out extremely low. If you're referring to my distrust of anonymous internet posts, what would you have me do with them? I'm sorry, but I simply cannot bring myself to take unreliable data at face value. It only seems rational to me that if a set of data is known to be unreliable, one should seek out other data upon which to draw conclusions. Finally, your insinuations about me having an axe to grind and massaging data for my own reasons is becoming rather irritating. If you wish to accuse me of something, I wish you'd simply do it and quit beating around the bush.

Third what you are failing to grasp and insist on waving you hands around regarding your friend's experience with ventilators is I am not talking about a specific piece of equipment, I am speaking of HOW choices are made. In medicine we do not look at a given procedure and say if we can make it some small percent safer, even if it is expensive, we do not ignore that, we embrace it. It is one of the reasons medicine cost what it does and why people fear managed care. Do we want insurance companies or government commissions looking and saying 0.001% risk is fine, never mind if we could knock it down to 0.00001. I mean if you are the company managing it or the gov and are looking to save dollars that probably sounds great, but IF, YOU, or your brother, mother or sister is one of the ones that comes down to the bad side of that equation it could really stink.

What you are failing to grasp is that a comparison between medical equipment/aircraft and firearms is an extremely poor one. First of all, I think that your reliability estimates for medical equipment and aircraft is inaccurate. Secondly, medical equipment and aircraft failure rates are as low as they are not only because great care is taken in their design, but because they are more scrupulously and frequently maintained than firearms are. In order to maintain a firearm as scrupulously and frequently as most aircraft and medical equipment, you would have to have your gun inspected by a qualified gunsmith and preemptively have any part which shows signs of wear replaced each and every time you fire it. Firearms, by and large, are not maintained to this degree because, due to the fact that they are much simpler than medical equipment and aircraft, they don't need to be.

Web Unless you are simply hopelessly invested in the ILS and it's alleged merits I do not think you can argue with this logic, even if as you say to YOU that risk is insignificant.

In the case of the ILS it need not cost anything to eliminate this risk whatever it is, just remove the lock.

The problem is, there is cost associated with removing the lock. If the lock were discontinued or made completely optional by S&W, their costs to produce revolvers would increase and thus the retail price of their guns would also go up. The lack of the lock would make their products unsaleable in MD and thus, in order to maintain their profits, they'd have to charge the rest of us more. Likewise, dropping the lock could potentially expose S&W to greater legal liability than they already have. Lawyers and lawsuits are expensive and those costs would almost certainly be passed on to the consumer

If the lock is removed aftermarket, there are still costs involved. Many people are not mechanically-inclined enough to remove the lock themselves so they must have it done by a gunsmith. Gunsmiths don't work for free so there is a monetary cost. Even if the lock is removed by the owner, removing a safety device from a firearm opens its owner up to increased legal risk. I consider that risk to be a cost because if one plays those odds and loses, the price that must be paid is extremely high.

That being said, if you want to remove the locks from your guns, go right ahead. I am not the one that must take on those risks so it matters not to me. This does, however, bring us right back to the original question of this thread: why do people who dislike the lock choose to buy guns without it rather than simply removing or disabling it?