I do not own a Sterlingworth or any grade of Fox for that matter. I do not however de-activate the auto safety feature on any of my doubles which have them. I was never involved in serious competitive target shooting, primarily hunting & a bit of casual clays for practise. As my desire was to always take the gun "OFF Safe" as it came to shoulder, it therefore required to be "On Safe" prior to the mount. For this purpose there is simply no handicap to an auto-safe & its just a bit of insurance. I have never however conditioned myself to just automatically rely on that auto feature but check each time I load or reload the gun.
For a gun which might see use both on a target range & as a hunting gun Lefever Arms Co had the best design I am aware of.
They used a 3 position safety. center position was safe, forward was fire which was automatically returned to safe upon opening & closing closing the gun. The rear fire position however was not a manual setting as on most other 3-position safeties but rather by turning a screw in located in the top tang the safety could be locked into the rear fire position, thus making it a non-safety gun. Unless locked out by the screw it would not stay in the rear position.
