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I certainly would not deliberately carry a gun I was not familiar with, but it could be useful to make yourself as familiar with as many different types of handguns as is practical.

In John Farnam's handgun courses, he teaches gun handling methods designed to be applicable to as wide a range of handguns as possible. For example, always cycling the slide by pulling it back and letting it go, rather than using the slide release, since the slide release varies from gun-to-gun, and you won't always have the slide locked back when you need to cycle it.

He has a shooting drill in the course that he calls the "Bar Room Pickup" (not that he advocated going to the bar, armed or not). We all put our guns on table with a spare magazine. He goes down the line and introduces various malfunctions, e.g. stove pipes, puts dummy rounds in the primary magazine, that sort of thing. We line up a few paces back, and then at the whistle charge forward, grab the first handgun, and try to hit the target, um I think with three rounds or so, with a magazine change in there some place. Sometimes it will go off, sometimes not - you have to work thru the malfunction with an unfamiliar pistol (while moving of course) and get rounds on the target. We go thru this drill until everyone has fired and "un-malfunctioned" everyone else's pistol. It's pretty fun, actually, and after it was over with I realized I never noticed the difference in recoil or noise between any of the guns -- I was too busy doing the drills and hitting the target.

Again, you should be thoroughly familiar with your own gun, and have fired it enough to have confidence in it, but it also helps your confidence to know you can pick up about anything and get it working if possible.

elb