Safety

A safety was a device present on some weapons that prevented them from being fired accidentally.

Upon being invited to join the Commandant's Cadets, a secret society at the Arkanis Academy, Zare Leonis was instructed to kill Penn Zarang, a poorly-performing cadet, in order to prove his worthiness. He was to shoot the cadet during a training exercise to make the incident appear to be an accident. To aid in accomplishing this, he was provided with an E-11 medium blaster rifle and instructed to engage and disengage the weapon's safety three times for it to fire full-power shots.

The NN-14 blaster pistol given to Rey by Han Solo was one such weapon equipped with a safety switch. When she attempted to use it against Unkar Plutt and his thugs, she found it did not work because she had not disengaged the safety, a feature she was unaware of. She later disengaged it before using the weapon against First Order stormtroopers.

Text and facts from the “Safety” article on Wookieepedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Modified for this site.