Enhanced Grip Safety

I wanna talk to you a little bit about this enhanced grip safety that I've got on one of my Springfield XDS. This one was done by Business End Customs. And the idea here is that the grip safety on these guns, is obviously designed to prevent the gun from being discharged if you don't have a good solid firing grip. If the gun is in a box, you're reaching in, if someone's trying to take the gun from you, and they get their finger on the trigger. But you were just wrestling with them while it was coming out of the holster. So there's a lot of circumstances where the trigger might get pulled accidentally, maliciously or negligently, and the grip say if you not be depressed, and the gun won't go off. This is one of those safeties that is manually operated, but it's also just sort of passive in the process of getting a good firing grip and shooting the gun. So it's one that we certainly don't mind on a defensive gun. But we're aware that it can be a liability. If the grip safety isn't engaged properly when you get the grip on the handgun. Now, most people are familiar with the 1911 series of pistols, and most people know, especially if they're interested in a defensive use of a 1911, that the original grip safety is on the 1911 were much smaller and much less pronounced than the current generation of guns, especially in the defensive arena have. Where we see that evolution first was taking the standard grip safety on the 1911 and enhancing it in much the same way that Business End Customs has done for the grip safety on the XD series of pistols. And what they've done is they've just simply taken the exact same profile and built it up. So that it's a little more pronounced. It comes off the gun a little bit more which means you're going to get a more positive engagement with the Palm of your hand, as you grip and engage it. You also can see that while this one is completely concave service. This one actually has a little bit of a bump. Now on the 1911, when that change started to happen in the eighties and nineties. People would call this a memory bump because obviously there'd be a tactile stimulus on the hand to help you know that your grip was in the right place. And they also might call it a tactical bump. The idea that that bump is there to engage the safety more positively. Now, one of the issues that some people have with the Springfield series of pistols is that when they grip the gun, the grip safety is disengaged, just exactly like it's supposed to be. But when they get ready to lock the gun open, a shift in the hand occurs when they put the thumb on the slide stops. So if you're going to grip the top of the gun and open up your Palm to push up on that slide stop, you might have this safety disengaged on the Standard Model, because your hand is not set deeply into the beaver tail at the top of the grip. So when you make that shift, you sometimes, and again you might be doing this in an emergency situation. You might be doing this in a situation where you have to lock the gun open to strip a magazine and a double feed in the middle of a fight, clearing that malfunction obviously is important. We don't wanna get into a situation where the shift of the grip from the shooting position causes us to not have that grip safety activated. And in that case what would happen is this slide won't open. So when we think about why we'd want to have an enhanced grip safety over the standard concave relatively low profile one, it's not just for the sake of making sure the gun will go off, but it's also making sure that we can manipulate the gun appropriately in this particular design. Now this is my everyday carry gun. You can see it doesn't have an enhancement. I trust the Springfield XDS grip safety to work reliably because I've practiced with it. When I engage the gun, I don't have any issues with it but there's no doubt that on this particular gun that Business End Customs customized for me, I'm glad to have that enhanced safety. It just means that much more surety in my mind that when I grabbed this gun, when I need to manipulate the gun, that grip safety is gonna get out of the way. And obviously it still works exactly the same way. If I were to reach down right now, accidentally, negligently, reach down and get my fingers in the trigger area and try to pull the trigger. The gun is not gonna go off because that grip safety isn't disengaged. So it's in no way taking away from the safety aspect. But it's enhancing our ability to make sure that safety is deactivated when we need the gun the most, when we're in the middle of a fight. So take a look at this option for Business End Customs. There may be other options available that you can find. If you're a Springfield XD user, If you carry the gun, if you are finding that your hand fits the gun really well, you can shoot the gun really well, but sometimes that grip safety, isn't getting disengaged consider having an enhanced grip safety job done by a Custom Gunsmith, such as Business End Customs, that you can find that you want to work with and you trust with your defensive gun.