Ah, but if the semiaito had jammed?
I’m not seeing how a double action revolver (pull the trigger, boom) would have elicited a different outcome.
“Ah, but if the semiaito had jammed?
I’m not seeing how a double action revolver (pull the trigger, boom) would have elicited a different outcome.”
Firing any sidearm in a hand-to-hand situation can be problematic.
Since all modern revolvers come to rest after their last fired round with an empty case under the hammer, they must be recocked (either manually, or by cycling the trigger all the way through) to bring a fresh round into alignment with the barrel. Any drag or friction (such as grabbing, as lentulusgracchus noted) will make it far tougher for the shooter to fire the next shot; mechanical advantage is not terribly good.
By contrast, modern semi-autos (”autoloaders,” or “self-loaders,” as they used to be called) extract and eject the fired case, then feed a fresh round, coming to rest with a live one under the hammer. A light pull on the trigger will fire the next round - an action nearly impossible for an assailant to counter, even if the hammer has been decocked and the shooter is using pure trigger pressure to fire again (as in the Beretta 92 or SIG 228, US M9 and M1 equivalents respectively).
If the assailant is grasping the arm’s slide, the pistol may fail to fully cycle for a follow-up shot: a stoppage, in military terms (”Jam” refers to a malfunction that cannot be remedied by any immediate action the shooter can apply - usually jams need at least partial disassembly and might require tools, not to mention considerable time).
The best and most recent test data indicate that autoloaders will fail to fire the second shot about 100 times more often than revolvers. This may sound terrible, but as recently as 1970, an autoloader was 5000 times more likely to fail at that second shot. The narrowing margin is attributed to improvements in ammunition, and subsystem design.