If they are so dangerous WHY does almost all the gear sold have that type clip? Safety sausages, hose clips, and lots of other comercially sold gear has this type clip.
To be honest, a lot of the scuba gizmos I see in shops are total garbage - made for cheap, sold for max profit and designed by people who don't dive. They get away with it because the biggest market for such gizmos are novice divers.
If it is so dangerous wouldn't this be a liability issue?
Twice you've said "so dangerous" and yet nobody responding in this thread has actually said that.
They fail to mitigate a known risk in specific circumstances. Nothing more, nothing less. Options exist that do mitigate that risk - hence, a more generally approved option.
Or is this just something wreck/cave divers worry about and have extrapolated out to every situation?
Those who dive cave/wrecks aren't likely to swap over their attachments whenever they enjoy an open-water dive are they?
Entanglement in clips has contributed to diver fatalities in cave/wrecks. It's known risk mitigation factor. Given two equal options, why not opt for the safest?
The risk factors are far more severe in confined spaces when using guidelines, which makes the need to mitigate those risks far more critical, but it would be imprudent to assume that the open water environment would be free from such risks. If such an entrapment did occur in open water, it'd likely be easy to resolve - but that'd depend on the presence of mind of the diver. Panic kills - so it's unwise to write the risk off as irrelevant, especially when considering novice divers. As others in the thread have mentioned, there are times when even an open water diver might come into contact with lines, nets or kelp - all of which could become entrapped in a 'suicide' type clip. It'd probably never happen... very low odds.... but aren't most open water scuba incidents typically 'very low odds' freak accidents?
A diver might have good reason to opt for a 'suicide clip'. They certainly have good reasons for opting against one. Either way, that decision shouldn't be based on ignorance, nor because of "
what was on the dive center shelf at the time"...