I’m genuinely surprised when very little children manage to fire a gun. The safety is usually quite sturdy, the slide is usually far more robust than movies make it appear, and even the trigger can be hefty depending on the gun.
The gun would have to be chambered with the safety off for a three year old to pull the trigger effectively.
Which, to me, speaks of gross negligence that warrants a strong punishment.
The reason many kids shoot themselves is due to many design choices of these guns.
1- no safety, as in theory the officer's gun should only be drawn in life or death situations.
2- a round is already chambered for the same reason as above
3- the trigger pull is probably too heavy for young children to pull it with their pointer finger. This ends up with them reorienting the gun to where the muzzle is pointed at their chest and they use their thumbs to depress the trigger.
It's horrific and every employer whose employee's have firearms should provide a safe of some sort and require it's use while off duty.
The thumb on the trigger pull makes so much sense. I remember the first time I fired a pistol being surprised at how difficult it was to squeeze the trigger. I'd fired a .22 rifle quite a bit and the pistol felt ridiculous by comparison.
You're assuming that implementing a safety feature makes something safer. That's not always the case.
No sarcasm here, just adding switches and blockers can actually make something less safe. Autopilot features that keep cars in the center of the lane can make the driver less attentive, so it can make the car less safe overall. Softer boxing gloves encourage more head punches, making brain trauma worse. More padding on football players make hits harder, causing more damage overall.
If a manual safety switch on a gun makes people complacent, they could cause more negligent discharges. If people feel that a manual safety switch would make using the gun in an emergency more difficult, they may leave it off, causing the gun to be less safe than if it didn't exist (because the manufacturer would need to design around that).
The Glock has 3 safeties that prevent it from firing unintentionally. They are extremely reliable but they do not have a locking safety. A locking safety is great when the gun is being handled by someone that shouldn't but this should never be the case. The #1 safety on a gun is the owner. No amount of mechanism on a gun can override the owner. A gun is a tool. I am all for more gun control because there is a gun problem but there is also a people problem and we can't just blame everything on the guns.