The safer handgun for home/self defense. The revolver or the pistol?

[ManiacJoe]

1. This will depend on how you define "safer".

External safeties:

Revolvers as a rule have no external safeties. If you pull the trigger, the gun fires.

Some pistols have external safeties (thumb and/or grip and/or trigger). If the pistol has a safety, you need to turn it off before the gun will fire when you pull the trigger.

For the pistols without external safeties, they are like revolvers: when you pull the trigger, the gun fires.

Firing the gun:

Most modern revolvers are double/single action. If the hammer is down, pulling the trigger will bring back the hammer using a long, heavy pull, releasing the hammer and firing the gun at the end of the pull. If the hammer is manually pulled back, the trigger pull will be light and short to fire the gun.

Some pistols work the same way (double/single action). Other pistols only release the hammer by the trigger pull so that the hammer need to be manually cocked or cocked by the recoil of the gun.

Malfunctions:

As long as a revolver is well maintained, it will fire virtually every time. If it does malfunction, fixing it will virtually always require a gunsmith.

Pistols are more prone to malfunction, mostly during the reloading cycle, often due to issues with the magazine holding the extra ammo. However, these types of malfunctions are easily fixed by the user in seconds.


My recommendation would be a semi-auto pistol for the larger ammo supply and quicker reloads.

Regardless of which you get, if you are not going to have a gun safe to put it in, you will want something like a GunVault lock box to prevent unauthorized access.