USOG is a small and less-known YouTube channel, however, they regularly publish very interesting and educating videos. One of the latest USOG videos addresses a safety issue that is hard to immediately determine.

Many people would let somebody tweak the trigger mechanism of their firearm to make it better. And often times that guy is not a gunsmith but your buddy who “knows everything about guns”. One of these guys has probably worked on the rifle that is shown in USOG’s video. Let’s watch that video first.

As seen in the video, at first glance it seems to be a perfectly functional rifle. You chamber a round, put the gun on safe and pull the trigger to make sure it is on safe. Now as USOG mentions, the latter is a bad habit by itself because according to safety rules you should not pull the trigger unless you are ready to fire. At any rate, what happened with this rifle is after the trigger was pulled the sear released the striker which didn’t hit the primer because it was held back by the safety lever. That’s why when he disengages the safety lever, it releases the striker which having no engagement with the sear hits the primer of the chambered round.

What have we learned from this story? First, trigger work requires solid knowledge and skills and you should trust it only to a gunsmith. Second, the safety rules are there for a reason – never pull the trigger unless you are going to shoot the gun. Even if such a dangerous situation happened to you, the habit of following the rule of always pointing the gun at a safe direction will save you from an accident even if you are not aware that there is such a fatally dangerous issue.