Thats one way to look at it, but the other side is it goes off like in this case and it got him killed. I always have my safety on unless im pulling the trigger. Being a grunt its trained into my soul safety safety safety. Dumb mistakes gets you or somebody killed, just like this case...
Wait. The gun didn't get him killed by magically going off prompting the officer to open fire, to my knowledge. So its not like the presence or absence of an engaged safety or weather or not his gun was hot had any bearing.
BREAK
I get safety and I get the grunt thing. Always must have the decocker on the M9 engaged. There are reasons for why that is, of course.... However giving you best odd of survival in high stress close combat situation where your long gun suddenly becomes inop (broke or out of ammo) and you are actively engaging at close range, is not one of those reasons. The added safety (to protect against joe doing dumb **** in spite of all training) is worth it given the likelyhood that a grunt will have to whip out a pistol to engage a threat rather than simply getting down behind cover and reloading his long gun, or making the decison to switch to a pistol as a last resort, is infitesimally small.
Do what you are comfortable with, but some food for thought if you are interested...
Loaded pistol with no safety or no safety engaged, in a holser never shoots by itself
Loaded pistol in you hand won't shoot if you don't pull the trigger
With that said, say you have a imminent deadly thgreat,
You draw your pistol (congratulations you have a gun!)
Now lets worse case scenario it... .
Becuase you are stressed or engaged in a physical confruntation you forget to activate or you fat-thumb the safety because you are using your non-dominant hand and it remains on.
Pull the trigger and you get *nothing*
Then, if you have some training, the immediate action for failure to fire on a semi-auto handgun is the "tap, rack bang" drill.
You do that, and you get *nothing* again.
Best case is you try the safety "again" next (how long has that taken?) But its also likely that continue to tap rack bang because that is the immediate action dcrill for failure to fire, ejecting all your live rounds for the rest of the time you have left on the earth. Dying why your gun was broken or your ammo bad.