I say, it's okay to carry with round chambered, decocked, safety off. This is no different than a double action revovler.
As long as the pistol is in good mechanical order, there's no problem carrying it the way it was designed to be carried.
I have a cop friend who carried his PPK as a backup weapon back-in-the-day. He calmed my fears when he told me he carried this gun, decocked, safety off, for 10 years with no problems.
-stunks
My apologies in advance, as no flame is intended. My purpose here to put a matter straight that may save anyone taking a cue from this thread from an unexpected visit to an energency room (or a one-way trip to a morgue).
The quotes above are poor advice.
The safety arrangements of double-action revolvers are not in any way comparable. Revolvers generally don't have manual safeties, and what safety features they do have work very differently from those of the Walther PP series pistols. Equating the two is not merely a case of oranges vs. apples, but with bananas, avacados and coconuts thrown in.
For openers, revolvers do not have inertia firing pins, and the pins are so small and light they do not need to be locked. Nor are revolver firing pins mounted in heavy reciprocating slides that can move (unless locked closed, as by the safety on a Colt Gov't Model) if the gun is dropped.
Your cop friend answered the wrong question. It's not how many years he carried his Walther decocked with the safety off with "no problems". The question should have been: How many times did he drop it? And from how high, and on what kind of surface, and in what attitude did it land? If he didn't drop his pistol in those 10 years, his experience is worthless. If he did, presumably it did not fire on that occasion(s) or he would have said so. But was the gun damaged internally? Did he know? Could he tell?
The safety mechanism of a Walther PP series pistol is composed of parts that are so small, and so precisely fitted, that the average user hasn't got a clue whether the pistol is "in good mechanical order". Most don't know to disassemble the safety components or inspect them for proper operation, damage from wear or deformation, or a broken or missing spring. For example, the tiny spring that powers the hammer block is about the size of a lead pencil tip, and can be easily lost. Its absence might not be missed until the pistol fired full auto-- unless the pistol happened to be dropped first. The hammer block itself is not much bigger than a "smilie" icon and its contact surface is much smaller yet. Q: How many drops will it absorb?
Walther designed the PP series to be carried with the manual safety "ON", as that is the ONLY mode that positively locks the firing pin. That is explained, and stressed, in Walther's instruction manuals. Cops often ignore this warning, at their peril. The hammer block may prevent the hammer from moving forward to strike the firing pin, but it does not keep the slide and firing pin from moving rearward if the pistol is dropped and lands on the grip tang.
A few years ago a cop in a precinct station in Illinois dropped his Walther PPK/S out of his locker and shot himself through his kneecap. He was lucky in one respect: he didn't take the slug between the eyes. Of course the manual safety was not "ON"; he didn't think it was necessary.
M
