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Safety is a relative concept. Personally, I never found the need to walk around with the safety catch disengaged in any hunting situation I have ever been in, except one time when I was participating in a driven hunt for wild boar in Bulgaria and using a BRNO ZKK 602, which had a safety catch which worked just the opposite of the 1917 Enfield safety I was most familiar with. When I got to my assigned shooting point, I carefully released the safety in anticipation of some quick action, but when two yearling (Ueberlaeufer) pigs ran across my front, I threw the rifle up and promptly instinctively pushed the safety catch forward, reengaging it.

I have hunted over the years with a number of target shooters, including members of the United States International Skeet Team. Once, my brother and I were shooting quail with one such team member, who had also been a sniper instructor in Vietnam and a hunting safety instructor at Fort Sioll, Oklahoma. The dog came on point facing up a small gully, and I walked up behind him, my friend was on my left and my brother and my friend's wife were on my right, all slightly in front of the dog. The birds flushed straight away from me, giving my friend a passing shot and me a straight away. In the excitement of the moment, my friend fired and hit both his wife and my brother from a distance of about 40 yards. The shot hit his wife in the legs, but other than the pain involved she was uninjured, thanks to the thermal underwear whe was wearing under her jeans. My brother ws not so fortunate, since he had only khaki pants for protection. Several pellets broke the skin, not only on his legs, but also in his face, where several reside to this day.

As far as soldiers on the battlefield moving with their weapons unlocked, I am sure this is accurate, but I am equally sure that the percentage of combat injuries and deaths related to friendly fire are far greater than reported. I have watched the kind of training soldiers are given, and most of it consists of shooting from a concrete simulated foxhole over sandbags at pop-up targets. As far as I have been able to determine, virtually no training, if any at all, is given to equip troops to move safely on the battlefield without endangering their comrades.

I have never handled a Krieghoff S/S double rifle, but I am quite familiar with a similar cocking arrangement with Krieghoff drillings, and my main objection to it is that it displaces the safety slide to an inconvenient location. I have Krieghoff, Sauer and Greifelt drillings, all pre-war, and all with the separate rifle barrel cocking arrangement. However, instead of a slide on the neck of the stock, the rifle barrel is cocked by means of a lever on the left side of the action. I have one post-war Krieghoff drilling with the same arrangement. It is easy to operate with the left hand and does not interfere with the operation of the normal, shotgun style safety.

My bete-noir in the safety department is the Greener safety, which I find very difficult to disengage and almost impossible to reingage while wearing gloves. If there is a trick to this which I have been unable to master, I would welcome being told about it.

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