RE: What pistol for self defense?
I see you picked one out, good for you, but I'll still throw my two cents in, in case there is someone else in your boat checking your post out.
I'd recommend a Ruger KP-97D or KP-95D, these are the P-series, stainless decockers with polymer grip frames....absolutely awesome guns especially for the price. The P-97 is .45acp, the 95 is 9mm, if they bring out a polymer stainless decocker .40S&W it would be better still for you. The polymer frames are light, and balanced towards the muzzle a great deal (since all the weight is in the slide and bbl, and most of it is in front of your hand. Fill the mag and it balances perfectly over your hand, and if you run them out in a hurry, as your shots are getting less and less stable from rapid fire, the balance point is moving more and more towards the muzzle, which helps reduce your muzzle hop.
Having polymer gripframes and having all the weight on top, recoil is translated more into a good rotation instead of a straight kick to the hand, which is good for beginners...and like I said, the gun being slightly muzzle heavy with a half mag or less helps keep this rotation down to a minimum, so the gun absorbs most of it's own recoil.
Beginners can get too caught up on all the gadgets on a gun, manual safeties are great and it's usually good to have one if your pistol is your first gun, but if you already know how to safely handle a firearm, a decocker is the way to go, you get double action/no safety speed of a double action with the light follow up shot trigger pull of a single action, pop the decocker and it's safe, but still ready.
Rugers are hard to beat, they may not be the finest firearms, but they're accurate enough for a pistol, and very very reliable. I've had my P-97 for nearly two years now, run around 10,000rnds through it so far, the only jam I have had was one stove pipe which happened when I only had one round and NO magazine in the gun, it shouldn't jam because of that, but it might have had something to do with it...if I were firing like that anywhere other than the range, it wouldn't matter because the gun wouldn't be worth much plumb empty.