by eoskx- practicalshootinginsights.com
Not clicking on that at work, but, if it's related to the P320, there's no reason that Congress hasn't ordered an investigation into this.
There's a decent chance that the handgun our men and women are issued is a danger. When the M16 had problems early in Vietnam there was an investigation and they found out it was a powder issue in the cartridges. No (good) reason that there's not something similar for this issue here.
And Sig can dig their heels in all they want, but when you've got ranges banning P320s and they're in the bargain bin at the local gun shop, well, the market has spoken. You can't unring that bell. Stop production of the P320, fire the executives, and do what it takes to repair this issue.
A few notes:
- Sig has known about it for years[1]
- A company recently filed a patent for a fix[2] and they offered Sig the rights to it before filing, but Sig refused.
- The Air Force has cleared the 320 for use[3]. In my pessimistic opinion, they probably determined the cost to procure new weapons would exceed the cost to replace lost airmen.
[1] https://smokinggun.org/court-records-reveal-sig-sauer-knew-o...
[2] https://www.wearethemighty.com/military-news/patent-says-the...
[3] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/08/25/m18s-cleared-...
They didn't just clear the gun for use, they arrested the airmen who shot the guy and lied about it. It totally changes the framing of what happened.
In a Friday statement, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson said that the unidentified arrested person is accused of making a false official statement, obstruction of justice and involuntary manslaughter.
In this case, the whole "it want off by itself" claim was a lie.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2025/08/08...
> In this case, the whole "it want off by itself" claim was a lie.
I think we need to await the facts of the case and the judgement. The only public information I've seen strikes me as unusual.
The accused airman is being charged with involuntary manslaughter, which coupled with the extensive issues with the P320 brings up more questions than it answers.
I could come up with my own conjecture based on that information, but there's enough people doing that already.
The fact remains that the P320 malfunctions. There's been countless documented cases, and numerous recorded demonstrations of the issue on YouTube and elsewhere.
Even if the Airman’s firearm did fire on its own without them pulling the trigger, it begs the question, why was this loaded handgun pointed at anyone that they didn’t intend to kill.
It can be both Sig and this Airman’s fault at the same time.
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IANAL and the article is light on details, but charging involuntary manslaughter seems significant here? If the arrested airman negligently caused the trigger to be pulled with no confounding factors (e.g. poor firearm design or poor holster design), surely that would be regular manslaughter at least?
No, criminal negligence or even recklessness would be involuntary manslaughter. “Regular”, voluntary, manslaughter requires intent to kill (but differs from murder in that it does not require malice aforethought). The textbook example is heat-of-passion killing.
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It depends on jurisdiction, but involuntary manslaughter can just mean that someone died and you didn’t intend to kill them. You can still be negligent (playing with a loaded gun) and have it be involuntary.
Right, but that doesn't address the issues that all 320's have. In that case, the airman lied, but the guns still have those issues.
You are begging the question, in the classic meaning of the phrase. What issue specifically? I haven't seen a claim yet that ultimately didn't boil down to: "and the trigger was pulled".
Maybe the issue is that the 320 is too close to a competition trigger, and it isn't appropriate for a duty gun. But the gun has been under a microscope for years now, and no one has shown a design defect that causes the gun to fire by itself.
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> In this case, the whole "it want off by itself" claim was a lie.
That's the Air Force's accusation.
> In this case, the whole "it want off by itself" claim was a lie.
This might be true, but nowhere in the article you posted does it say that.
Even if the gun went off by itself the Airman is still most likely negligent. The first rule of firearms is that you only point it at things you intend to destroy.
I agree and disagree. A holstered pistol is intended to be treated, for all intents and purposes, as deactivated and "on safe" for practicality reasons, even when loaded. Plenty of people carry loaded guns pointed at their bodies daily in holsters, safely at that.
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Eh, or that’s a coverup.
As is classifying all the documents about the pistol and its issues.
There is nothing even remotely credibly related to national security about the P320 or issues related to it.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the military has a very long history of covering up issues with corruptly procured weapons.
Yes, the US military has been known to throw people under the bus to cover up their own fuck ups.
Just one particularly notorious example of many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Iowa_turret_explosion
> The first investigation into the explosion, conducted by the U.S. Navy, concluded that one of the gun turret crew members, Clayton Hartwig, who died in the explosion, had deliberately caused it. During the investigation, numerous leaks to the media, later attributed to U.S. Navy officers and investigators, implied that Hartwig and another sailor, Kendall Truitt, had engaged in a romantic relationship and that Hartwig had caused the explosion after their relationship had soured. However, in its report, the U.S. Navy concluded that the evidence did not show that Hartwig was homosexual but that he was suicidal and had caused the explosion with either an electronic or chemical detonator.
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The "fix" only works on models with a manual safety and only when the safety is engaged. If you release the safety, like many people tell you (as a matter of subjective opinion) that you should while conceal carrying, it won't do dick. Or even just release the safety because you're going to fire soon but not sure when -- same deal -- same flaw and it could go off without pulling the trigger.
So the fix is as good as commercially useless, although better than nothing, the market is basically the guy who wants to be able to take it to the range and then always have it downrange while the safety is off.
> there's no reason that Congress hasn't ordered an investigation into this
Cynically, there's a very good reason they haven't. Embarrassment, money, entitlement... lots of reasons, actually.
We would need a government body whose mission is to act in the people's interest. Maybe someday.
We would need a demos that is capable, trained, and willing to select such a government body. Our problem in the US is that we're bad at hiring.
Well, I should have specified, there's no good reason for no investigation.
Personally my money's on corruption but I have no proof.
Sig secured contracts for the Modular Handgun System (MHS) competition, with an objectively inferior design compared to every other entry, as well as the Next Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) program with the Sig MCX Spear firing an objectively worse proprietary cartridge with higher pressure (lower parts lifespan), more recoil and weight, and less capacity. This design takes the firepower and weight of light arms design back to the sixties when battle rifles were still issued. We've forgotten what we already learned decades ago, standardized intermediate cartridges have a plethora of benefits in combat and logistics.
Sig also won contracts for suppressors, optics, and probably more I'm unaware of or can't remember. Unit cost of the M7 is several times higher than the M4, it's heavier, has more recoil, carries less ammo, and the cartridge it fires is still stopped by commonly available body armor that's manufactured today.
Corruption is obvious in my mind, it's shocking Congress seems either oblivious or so complacent.
The intermediate cartridge doctrine is evolving as a result of improvements in armor. M855A1 5.56 cartridges fired out of a long (20") barrel may have success against modern armor, but slightly larger intermediate cartridges (6 and 6.5mm) are being adopted for supposedly superior performance. That doesn't excuse the weird 6.8 fury cartridge Sig designed around though.
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There's also no good reason that there wasn't standard testing before adopting the P320 to be the M18. Sig undercut Glock on price and the DOD said "eh... good enuf"
If it’s a manufacturing defect as some theorize, then the sample guns could have passed with flying colors, but the later ones have the potential issue.
It's at least partially a design and engineering problem. Sig shoehorned the hammer-fired P250 fire control unit into the P320, which is striker fired. The P250, being hammer fired, uses a fully cocked hammer capable of setting off a primer when dropped, and the P320 (to my understanding) also uses a fully cocked striker, meaning less trigger input is required for firing.
Hammer fired guns are capable of doing this safely because they have a sear geometry that requires moving the hammer back against spring pressure with trigger input a very short distance before the hammer drops. Along with a functioning sear block in case the hammer slips off the sear without trigger input, this makes them very safe.
Basically every other striker fired gun on the market uses a semi-cocked striker with a trigger widget and sear block, which is a copy of Glock's design, and it's quite safe.
Sig deviated from this design without fully proving it out. Their guns don't have trigger widgets, which allows the trigger to move under momentum when dropped, causing repeatable firings. The fully cocked striker design leads to a shorter, crisper pull, but a sear slip leads to uncommanded firings, unlike a semi-cocked design, which doesn't have enough energy to fire a primer.
Combine this with poor control of manufacturing, intermingling of parts designed and intended for different calibers, as well as factories in the US and India with varying levels of quality control and poor spec for parts to begin with (metal injection molding for fire control parts), and safety critical systems like the sear block have been shown to not be 100% reliable. It's a system of cascading failures resulting in a firearm that's unsafe to carry loaded.
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There were no standard trials for the M18 so Sig didn't even need magical sample guns.
There was a lot of standard testing, very controlled for that matter... it just didn't include drops at an angle that seem to allow for unintended discharge... If I were to guess, Sig is well aware of that angle at this point.
For the XM17 program that ended up adopting the P320, the military skipped their normal production verification testing.
See: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/07/05/glock-says-be...
Curious, what makes that not safe for work? It's a discussion about a handgun manufacturing error, and the manufacturer's failure to respond adequately to it.
They might have very zealous web filters. Something like Websense would categorize that site as "Weapons" related and visiting the site, even if not blocked, would result in a scoring change to the user's profile.
I don't blame them for playing it safe. I've personally had to help Bay Area HR types understand that looking at "weapons" sites by itself was probably okay when the company we worked for had thousands of employees across California and at least some percentage of them hunted, went target shooting, etc.
I'm the CTO at my company, and I had to convince my own IT guys that they needed to remove our firewall's weapons-related filters.
We really do live in a lame version of a cyberpunk dystopia, don't we.
Weapons are for hunting, target shooting and killing people.
These HR types (and many in the general population) need to understand that there's nothing wrong with the third point. Aside from the obvious case of self defense, people can only protect their freedom as long as they have equally powerful tools a those trying to oppress them.
Democracy can only work with the ability to kill evenly distributed.
There's a reason all dictatorships have strict gun control laws.
Not powder but many other failures in a particular model of the Vietnam era m16:
https://www.pewpewtactical.com/m16-vietnam-failure/
(I own an ar15 and an ak47 and it is like comparing Microsoft’s MFC to a shell script. The former is all bloat and high tolerances and the latter gets the job done with fewer moving parts.)
Both guns have a bolt carrier, rotating bolt, and similar amounts of fire control group components. Both need to be headspaced within a spec of a few thousandths of an inch.
The biggest difference is about 20 years of industrial development (moving from stamped/milled steel to aluminum)
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Despite the name of the website, it is focused on journalistic aspects of the firearms industry, but point taken.
A literal definition of commenting without reading the article
It's easy. The people in charge now care more about Sig's profits than the dead and injured soldiers who they see as losers and suckers.
Sig's response to this clusterfuck will be studied in PR classes for years to come. They started with a wildly overagressive social media campaign and have generally refused to admit there is a problem, and are banning, suing and generally trying to cover the whole thing up.
Independent testing at the local, state and federal level acknowledge you can fire a P320 without pulling the trigger. Making sure the gun only fires when the trigger is pulled is requirement #1, #2 and #3 for any gun.
> Making sure the gun only fires when the trigger is pulled is requirement #1, #2 and #3 for any gun.
If this isn't satisfied you haven't made a gun, you've made a really shitty grenade.
More like just a bad, open ended pipe bomb! A grenade is supposed to be more safe than this gun too!
Grenades have three manual safeties: thumb clip, pin, and spoon.
Only going off when you want it to actually happens to also be requirements #1, #2, and #3 for grenades
This is not the first time there has been a gun that is known to go off uncommanded. It happens more often than you think. The thing that made this situation unique is the PR response, which has completely killed Sig's reputation in the opinion of many people.
SIG USA didn't have much of a reputation to begin with, to be honest. Some of us still remember the SIG 556R debacle, and that wasn't the first time they shipped a broken gun either.
The only real surprise here is that they managed to sell this broken gun to the US government, despite Glock of all things being in the running. And that it took so long for the issue to even register.
I largely plan for misfires and accidents when handling a firearm. It happens, though not usually from mechanical failure. But to know the company is so acticely malicious and shady makes me never want to purchase another gun from them again.
And you know what? I still doubt they're gonna face any serious penalties, both to the company and to the execs.
We need laws to actually protect normal working people, not corporations and execs. Trying to silence people with lawsuits should be punished according to the severity of what they're trying to hide.
Since their shitty gun literally kills people randomly, this harassment campaign should be treated as cover up for murder and punished accordingly.
> I still doubt they're gonna face any serious penalties
Having to fix all P320 fire control units they've sold so far will put them out of business. You don't even need any additional penalties on top of that. I just hope they can spin off Optics division before that happens.
And that's why it won't happen. One of the reasons huge companies don't get punished in full is that destroying them could be destabilizing to the economy and therefore hurt's the ability of the people with power to get reelected.
Wouldn't someone buy their capital equipment and IP for pennies on the dollar if they went bankrupt though? So I don't know how much it would destabilize the economy, it would just shift around who runs the company. 'Sig' would cease to exist but 'this mass of capital that makes guns' and possibly even the employees, would still be around.
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I’m a huge Sig fan, I think they build a quality firearm. But I am not so blind to see they’ve made an insane mistake here. Recalling all P320s would’ve been better than this disaster.
It's a slide action handgun... hard to imagine any part of the design deserving "military secrets" protections when the devices themselves are the most widely available side arm in the US. Anyone can measure, 3D scan, weigh or otherwise capture the design to thousandths of an inch. For that matter, there are thousands of metal and gun smiths that could re-manufacture the design.
I could see the argument in the early 1900's, but today that's absolutely ridiculous on its face.
No, you see the novel genius of their slapdash hammer to striker conversion has to remain a secret in case the CIA ever gets a chance to poison an adversary nation's design process with it /s
If there's a known vulnerability (which is the case to the best of my knowledge) that can be exploited by an enemy to bring harm to American forces, that would be the very nature of protected National Security Information.
This is a weakness that can cause accidents, not some kind of remote exploit that would magically let an adversary make guns go off.
The only "national security issue" is that it's embarrassing.
I disagree, for the same reasons I support open vulnerability disclosures. Any other military could buy one of these pistols, analyze it, and put the vulnerability on Wikipedia or similar. These aren’t rare or hard to acquire.
Perhaps so, but there is a difference between an enemy independently discovering a weakness and telling them what it is. The first is strategy, the second is treason.
And when the OEM finds a vulnerability and withholds it, that's just "doing business" here in the states.
Yeah, you push someone over, their side arm might fire. Any such weakness on a side arm is not something widely or likely remotely exploitable.
Unless you have an earthquake machine.
This is pseudo-intelligence: "can be exploited by an enemy to bring harm to American forces" means nothing when talking about a metal gun. This isn't some computer vulnerable to RCEs or fly by wire bullets.
But what if the "enemy" has AI bullets with recognition and target tracking for the P320, so they can reliably target the gun with a smart bullet in order to have their gun go off and shoot themselves in the leg or something? /sarcasm
I'm with you... the idea that anything to do with a common side arm is worthy of "military secrets" protection is, as I said, absurd.
By this logic, it will be exploited even without disclosure.
I'll believe that when they take down the innumberable youtube videos demonstraiting it clearly
Like telekinesis?
This comment is the perfect example of how saying something obviously wrong (or nonsensical) on the internet is the best way to get people to respond (of which I am now guilty myself).
The (reasonable) GP comment has 1 reply and the (unreasonable) parent comment has 5 already.
I don't like linking to YouTube videos, but this one is a must-see if you're interested in the Sig debacle:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOMQOtOQoPk
Handgun design doesn't really get any worse than that.
not clicking that at work but if it's the video I think it is, I'm not sure how it applies to the DoD's M17/18 since those have a frame safety.
Oh it's very simple, you have to deactivate the safety to pull the trigger, which is what everyone decided to freak out about apparently.
I'm sorry but no, that video is absolutely terrible and honestly pretty embarrassing. Pulling the trigger causes the gun to fire, that's the entire point, and when the sear is in the frame and striker in the slide, wiggling the two will cause a change in sear engagement.
This particular video doesn't quite show anything out of the ordinary. If you pull the trigger past the wall then force it into firing with sympathetic movement of different parts of the pistol.
The P320 has had many reported issues but having it go off when you pull the trigger is actually intended behavior.
More information available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1KoSBcn2bY
I disagree. The comment below the video actually gets it right, emphasis added:
> "The shear amount of movement in the trigger it takes on the Glock PLUS the fact the trigger safety has to depressed lends it self to make this scenario extremely extremely unlikely to happen from jostling. Which is the exact opposite for the 320. Tiny amount of movement needed, way more slop in the gun as a whole and no trigger safety all lends itself to be way more likely to happen from jostling. Thats the argument."
way more likely to happen from jostling. Thats the argument.
The above claim is most likely true: it is easy to pull the trigger accidentally on the Sig. But that isn't the argument. People are claiming it will fire uncommanded.
The video is misleading because he is partially pulling the trigger, which deactivates the internal safety mechanisms.
It is the clickbait equivalent of a video claiming Rust is not memory safe, that starts by showing a Rust program running and causing a BSOD. Then deep in the video, what they show is he wrote a bunch of explicit unsafe code.
> The video is misleading because he is partially pulling the trigger, which deactivates the internal safety mechanisms.
While true that it is misleading, i still think it's fundamentally correct. You do not expect your firearm to discharge if someone bumps you while the trigger has the slack taken out.
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The Sig P320 also has another major issue with the trigger failing to properly reset or pull correctly, requiring all sorts of weird (official) modifications.
What do you want to bet this is a variant of some sort of light pressure against the trigger at some point in the past (including even just heavy movement!) causing a stuck trigger, plus these other issues, resulting in an uncommanded discharge ‘randomly’?
The FBI analysis showed truly terrible wear characteristics and quality control for the fire control parts which can’t be helping.
So, is your claim that an object in the holster is pulling the trigger causing the discharge? Congratulations, that's SIG's argument and if it was true it would exonerate them.
That’s not my claim. I don’t really trust Sig’s ass-covering on the numerous reported issues.
But in the case of the demonstration in the Wyoming Gun Project video, it is literally the case that an object is being jammed into the trigger until all internal safeties are disabled, then flex and sympathetic movement is applied until the gun goes off.
There may exist a more damning explanation of what has caused the reported uncommanded discharges but that video isn’t it
Having owned both a P320 and a Glock and handled multiple, "slop" in the guns out of the box are comparable. They're both mass-produced, polymer frame, striker-fired hand guns, not hand-finished 1911's.
If you put a few thousand rounds through either it will generate slide and frame rail wear. After this, either would have slightly more "slop" between the frame and the slide.
The glock trigger-dingus can make unintended discharges less likely because it requires an object to go into the trigger guard. But the WyomingGunProject video shows someone putting something in the trigger guard, pulling the trigger past the wall with sympathetic movement, then firing the gun. Not the result of "jostling".
This isn't to say there aren't P320's that couldn't fire uncommanded but the WyomingGunProject video is not the proverbial "smoking gun". The exact cause is, at this time, not publicly known.
I will admit that I am somewhat uncomfortable in how striker-type has become defacto standard pushed in most conversations I had around these. I understand the argument for it, but when it comes to firearms, convenience should not be a priority. A person handling it must be certain that it will perform as expected ( heavens know there is enough variation with plain 1911 ).
Worth mentioning that there are ~3 companies called Sig with many name changes over the years:
SIG Switzerland, the original who mainly services the Swiss government and domestic market. They created the original P210, SG 550 series, etc
SIG Sauer Germany, the now-defunct company SIG Switzerland created when it bought German firearms company JP Sauer and Sons in order to develop, market, and sell firearms in a legally easier jurisdiction. They are most famous for the P220 series of handguns.
SIG Sauer USA, the New Hampshire based company that was initially created to make importing easier that is now by far the largest and most well known SIG. They created the P250, P320, P365, SG556, MCX series, etc. They are very well
Overall, SIG Switzerland and Germany have very good reputations for making high quality products (Sig Sauer Germany almost won the competition with the P226 to become the M9, they lost because they were more expensive than the Beretta 92, very similar to what happened between Glock and Sig Sauer USA for the M17...), SIG USA on the other hand does not.
Please stop repeating this incorrect corporate structure. While there are still 3 entities, they are all now owned by the same German holding corporation, L&O Holdings, which is owned by 2 German individuals. The holding company now includes Sig Sauer USA, Sig Sauer AG (Swiss), and Sig Germany.
I do agree with your assessment of quality between the companies, though.
It's unclear to me how much L&O Holdings actually does to bring the two remaining Sigs together (Sig Germany is defunct as of 2020). They do not sell each others products, do development cooperatively, produce cooperatively, etc as far as I've seen. Sig Switzerland issued that foot-in-mouth memo backing the P320, so there's clearly something happening between the two, but I think presenting them as separate is more accurate than claiming they have a close relationship because the same holdco owns them both.
That's not correct. Sig Sauer USA's VP of Engineering Adrian Thomele was originally an Sig Sauer AG employee, who owned a company that was acquired by Sig Sauer AG. There are other examples of engineering management propagating from the German/Swiss entities and sharing IP between one another. Secondly, Sig Swiss AG recently announced that they would be manufacturing the P320. The German entity was shuddered to decrease manufacturing costs and effectively offshore to Sig Sauer USA, who is now also offshoring more manufacturing operations to India. I think there is much less independence than you might think between the entities.
Oh interesting, I didn't know that about Adrian or Sig Swiss manufacturing the P320.
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Another interesting history are the dates and models adopted by a US agency. Secret Service switched from the Beretta M9 (made in Maryland at the time) to the P229 in 1998. 20 years later to the Glock 19 and Glock 47 (probably Smyrna, Georgia sourced).
The consumer market in the US no longer trends off government models though. Thin and mini models seem to be more popular, and since most consumers rarely fire their weapon, maintainability and reliability are secondary. The P365 is the most popular in the US at the moment, but it probably has a low duty cycle.
Eh, the reality is that the consumer market never trended off government models all that tightly. What you're seeing is the evolution of duty handguns; metal framed hammer fired wonder nines to polymer framed striker fired handguns. When consumers buy the latter they typically buy Glock 19, 17, 20, etc and there's an argument that they're influenced by government procurement decisions but even still the P320 never sold as well as Glock. As for the P365, it's a different category of handgun, a small-ish concealed carry handgun with way better capacity than the previous generation. Springfield Hellcat and Glock 43x are some of the competitors, not the P229. It's also worth mentioning that when the military or cops need a concealed handgun, they very frequently opt for the P365.
As for the P365 having maintenance/reliability/duty cycle issues, beyond the typical SIG beta testing on consumers shit I really haven't seen people having issues with it.
In the military, pistols are carried by people who don't expect to use them. They're carried by MPs, who are cops. Officers, tankers, and flyers carry them, but they're only for emergencies. Those headed into ground combat carry something bigger than a pistol.
Col. David Hackworth was involved in picking the next Army handgun, back in the Beretta era. He remarked that over the history of the M1911A, it had been responsible for more friendly casualties than enemy casualties. They hoped to do better with the Beretta. The main criteria was that it should reliably fire when wanted, and reliably not fire when not wanted. Even with poor maintenance. Accuracy is secondary. Most handgun engagements are in the 3-7 meter range.
> In the military, pistols are carried by people who don't expect to use them.
On the other hand, the units that issue something other than the M17 (special operations groups use Glock 19s, can use suppressed HKs, or presumably even some of the old P226s or 1911s that are still in the inventory) expect to fight with them.
> They hoped to do better with the Beretta. The main criteria was that it should reliably fire when wanted, and reliably not fire when not wanted.
That design was rather a failure in that regard. Great pistols in a lot of ways, it's not difficult to be accurate with them, but there's a slide-mounted safety on it that is easy to accidentally actuate in the heat of the moment when racking the slide. (it's less user friendly than the much older 1911's safety, and weirdly, Beretta will sell you one today with a 1911-style frame mounted safety. I'm not sure when they created that.) When that happens the gun does not fire when the trigger is pulled. Perhaps someone somewhere has estimated how many people died that way over the gun's lifetime.
A modern, striker-fired pistol like a Glock or the M17 is undeniably more reliable when it's dirty, so there's also that.
That Beretta safety was always a bit of a misfeature and the civilian versions of the pistol are available with a simple de-cocker in its place. The safety feature of the Beretta (and of the P226, the pistol the military should have chosen for its standard over the Beretta if we're being honest) which is useful for avoiding accidental discharges is the heavy double-action trigger pull on the first shot.
Indeed, and if you ask the sergeants they can tell plenty of modern horror stories.
If anything, what the military needs is a hammer-fired DA handgun with a manual safety. Just so that discharging it would take considerable and intentional effort. If I remember correctly, FN FNX was in the running in that competition, and would probably be just the perfect gun for this (it has a combination safety/decocker, and unlike many other similar arrangements you can put it on safe after decocking).
Fine, seems then that there's pretty good grounds for cancelling every one of Sig's contracts for national security reasons.
The state should have no secrets during peace time. Secrets in the state when there's no official declaration of war should be considered corruption and ideally result in formal punishment.
It's a frustrating situation.
The reality is there may be no real mechanical flaw that leads to an uncommanded discharge. So far, no one has been able to produce evidence of anything specific.
However, if they had addressed the drop safety and added a trigger safety from the get-go, chances are even if there IS something, it would be so rare it would fade into the background.
But now the P320 is going to be remembered forever as "that gun that goes off on its own" and it'll be hard to even give them away. And Sig's response to this whole debacle has been terrible. Making the drop safety fix a 'voluntary upgrade' instead of a recall, and now crap like this just makes everyone view Sig in a bad light.
Reputation can be everything for some industries - and for safety especially. (See: Boeing)
Guns, and pistols in particular is a wiiiiiide market with a lot of players. If one reputation goes down the toilet, people will just buy from someone else. They have 0 reason to stick with Sig in particular.
IMO these companies do the bog standard math of (chance of accident * legal cost) vs (cost to recall and repair guns). They don't consider a critical aspect - reputation. Once lost it is very hard to regain and hurts future sales of ALL products, not just this one.
I’m pretty sure the discharge issues are entirely repeatable now. Someone made a video about it: https://youtu.be/jOMQOtOQoPk
I'm assuming they're taking advantage of the fact that these models share a design spec with military models, which both have the same flaws. I would assume the only difference is that the military model is full auto.
Edit: apparently not full auto, man we should have just let Glock take the contract when they started manufacturing in the US instead of Sig, their track record is much more sound.
Sig's track record was just as sound as Glock's before the P320. The P226 was the Navy SEAL's sidearm of choice for a bit and it nearly became the standard sidearm for the US armed forces in the 1980s, narrowly losing out to the Beretta 92. The P210 is widely considered to be the most accurate service pistol ever created.
Sig Sauer Inc in Exeter, NH is a completely different company than SIG Sauer AG in Switzerland.
The Swiss Sig's have a sterling reputation. The P226 that entered the XM9 trials (against the Beretta 92) was imported from Switzerland by SAKO.
The US company didn't really start manufacturing until the 90s with the P229 and the Sig Pro series (where they were only tasked with making the plastic frames, not the more intricate lock work).
If we're talking about Swiss SIGs, that'd be the P210 handgun and to a lesser extent, the SG 510 assault rifle. The P226s were always German SIGs (at least until SIG US got started), the "Montage Suisse" models being assembled in Switzerland from German parts rather than being the product of the Neuhausen factory.
That company structure is no longer quite the case. L&O Holdings (Germany-based holding company controlled by 2 German individuals) owns Sig Sauer USA, Sig Germany, and Sig Sauer AG.
Not even that - the only difference between the Sig M17/M18 handguns that the US Army uses and the consumer P320 is a manual safety. Otherwise, they are indistinguishable.
Consumer P320s, and Sig striker-fired pistols more generally, are generally available both with or without manual safeties.
Consumers can buy a civilian version of the M17 that's really difficult to distinguish from the Army's version (the safety's a different color, black instead of brown, or something like that).
A manual safety that does not seem to prevent uncommanded discharges. Which is, y'know, part of the point of a safety.
Yep, the fact that the safety merely blocks the trigger and doesn't block the striker in case of accidental sear disengagement is horrifying.
The M17/M18/P320 has a striker block, and you have to pull the trigger to disengage it.
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Does any service in the world have a standard issue full auto handgun?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_pistol
There are many that have adopted machine pistols for various uses, particularly special forces, VIP protection, and for the roles currently filled by PDWs, which means that common troops sometimes were issued them.
Standard issue, probably not. But in use? Maybe sorta
The Glock 18 is a selective-fire variant of the Glock 17, developed at the request of the Austrian counter-terrorist unit EKO Cobra, and as a way to internally test Glock components under high strain conditions.
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stechkin_automatic_pistol. AFAIK only still used as a PDW by combat pilots, everybody else switched to AKS74U. Based on what I heard from people who had a chance to fire it, the full auto mode is basically pointless, so it just ends up being a larger and heavier PM (ironically, it found some use in that latter role because it also means less recoil).
what would be the point other than to just waste bullets?
Bullet volume is very important for suppression. Although the role of suppression usually is filled by a SAW rather than a MP.
So once again, what would be the point for an auto handgun? You just said it's the wrong weapon for suppression. A 17 round mag fired in single rounds in quick succession would keep an opposing foe's head down longer than a 17 round mag in auto fire single trigger pull. Even pulling double tap style firing requires training/practice to keep both bullets accurate or else even that's wasteful
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Machine pistols have been sold for the purpose of being personal protection weapons for people who would only be lightly trained on the use of a handgun. Spray and pray is all you're going to get out of the user anyway.
Machine pistols require far MORE training to use compared to a standard pistol. They are downright dangerous to use without proper training, both for the user and the people around them.
I don't know where to begin on this other than to say handling a full-auto handgun is far worse for untrained personnel than a semi-auto handgun. It's even a challenge for highly-trained personnel.
Additionally, the very long history of machine pistols would indicate the form-factor is a poor fit for the application of any full-auto fire.
This is the primary reason that personal defense weapons (PDWs) were developed in the first place.
I could see that as being a useful role for a VIP protection team where you might not be able to carry larger guns for whatever reason but still want to designate some team members to suppress a potential attacker
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You can hit your monthly training quota way quicker.
Not "standard issue" but a Glock with a switch is an example.
Something like an MP5 is going to be far more ergonomic in situations where one might find this kind of sidearm useful.
Would also be a lot cooler and reliable than putting anything more than two magazines through an 18C or 93R.
No.
> man we should have just let Glock take the contract when they started manufacturing in the US
One of the stated requirements for the updated pistol was a thumb-operated external safety. Glock's never been willing to manufacture a pistol with that feature, so they effectively excluded themselves from the competition.
[dead]
Somewhat related - are military supplies required to give manufacturing design/specifications to the DoD? Some kind of intellectual property escrow should the company ever go out of business, stop making the item, such that the the defense department could recreate the item if required?
Great question.
It depends. This is something the program office would consider as part of its acquisition strategy, and then this would be part of the competitive bid process and contract negotiations.
There is such a thing as Government Purpose Rights (GPR) that might, for example, allow the government to subcontract with third parties for replacement parts which would enable competition to keep costs down. This is really important because most of the costs in an acquisition come from the long tail of sustainment, not the initial purchase.
For something like the M17/M18, the Army wouldn’t necessarily want or need to buy the complete intellectual property behind the weapon. What they care about is having enough rights to ensure lifecycle support, competition for parts or sustainment contracts, etc. Your example of a company going out of business is a perfect example of where GPR would be relevant.
To add to the other answers, if you're doing research on the subject the search term you want to use is Technical Data Package (a level 3 TDP has sufficient detail to manufacture the item).
Typically the design becomes the property of the US Gov’t, and is then licensed out to the original company - or sometimes others - to manufacture for the exact reasons you state.
Part of the problem is "the market" wanting duty pistols with match/sport triggers. Anyway the p320 is dead and will taint SIG reputation for years to come.
P320/M17/M18 trigger weight is not the problem. Glocks have roughly similar weights (except for the NYPD horror show), so do S&W, Walthers, and any number of other pistols.
Trying to equipment-ify your way out of a training problem resulted in NYPD equipping its pistols with a trigger so heavy that their already-easy qualification course became a problem for many recruits. Their hit percentage in actual shootings is awful, and that ~12 pound NYPD-spec trigger didn't help it any. They finally saw the error of their ways after making their officers suffer needlessly for years.
https://www.police1.com/patrol-issues/articles/nypd-should-i...
12-pound duty trigger is absolutely wild. I wonder how many cases of collateral injuries there were because of it.
Unless the Army is invoking CTI/CUI this will be hard to defend
Ah yes, the secret design of pistols which go off at the slightest bump (its a lottery, only 1 in 1,000 chance!)
Revoke contracts, investigate the leadership who accepted the contract, and hold Sig criminally liable given they have internal documents from years ago acknowledging the fact.
Agree. The remedy for this is federal disbarment.
Absolutely none of this shit is gonna get close to happening.
The recent week long pause in the Air Force seems like some brass made a decision that Sig or DoD forced them to walk back.
its funny how we only have a problem when the gun shoots us lol why wasnt one of the universal human rights the right to not being shot?
Universal human rights only exist so far as men with guns are willing to defend them.
Universal human rights violations only exist so far as men with guns are willing to threaten them.
If we had to choose a world with guns or a world without, then a world without is the obvious choice. Its the SUV problem. SUVs are safe! From what? ... other SUVs.
Of course we can't have a world without guns, so it's all theoretical.
Just found another guy doing some interesting tests - he compares the amount of trigger pull required in order for input on the slide to cause a discharge across the P320, G19, G26, and CZ P10.
https://www.youtube.com/@Thinkingman615
He's ostensibly defending Sig here, but it's obvious that the P10 in particular has a dramatically more robust construction and stands up to this scenario much better.
Obviously all of this comes in the context of nonzero input on the trigger, which is already a violation of basic gun safety. But it's interesting nonetheless.
It's so weird that SIG didn't just mandate a recall on this issue and dealt with it. So many other gun manufacturers had recalls for less serious issues than this and just dealt with it. How does SIG somehow deal worse with this situation than fucking taurus? This has got to be some kind of fucking ego trip by someone inside, this kind of response just doesn't make any rational sense otherwise.
> Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Assuming that Sig Sauer management is reasonable, we can assume that one or more of these are true:
* The known rate of failure B is determined to be low. Consider that not every discharge would be from a design flaw. Many cases can be assumed or proven to be user negligence.
* They assume that they can keep the court settlement costs, C, to a low value by never admitting fault and hoping that no one else can convincingly demonstrate a poor design. Many cases result in no injury or non-lethal injury, which naturally reduces C.
* The number of guns produced, A, is quite large, so the cost of the recall is also quite large.
* The unit cost of the recall (X/A) is much higher than known externally. This is my preferred theory (outside of corporate incompetence & malice). It could be the case that the design has an issue with tolerance stacking AND there is no single dimension of replacement part that resolves the issue. You could imagine that the replacement part needs to take up negative tolerance by being slightly larger, and positive tolerance by being slightly smaller. Without carefully measuring each unit (which is expensive), you can't determine which part to use. Or it could be that the part that would need to be replaced is a substantial part of the weapon's cost, e.g. the slide or the frame.
I always thought that Fight Club quote missed a crucial extra number: D, the cost of brand reputational damage. Maybe best expressed as multiplier <1 on revenue that converges towards 1 over time.
Maybe a decade from now this becomes a semi-obscure bit of gun lore and SIG US more or less recovers.
But right now?
If you’re in the market for a handgun, or any gun for that matter, are you going to touch SIG US’s stuff? Maybe, but there are customers who might just say that they don’t want to take that chance and go with Glock or whoever else. Do those customers come back? Why doesn’t this get brought up at every single bid for a contract SIG US makes from now on?
It’s possible that they’re still making the right EV call of course, but the medium-term hit they’re taking from a flaw like this that you don’t make right has to be massive.
They already did a recall for a much less serious issue, the drop safe recall, so they have proven that they are willing to recall if there is something to fix.
They didn't actually do a recall for that. Instead it was a "voluntary upgrade" program. That is also not a less serious issue.
It may shock you to learn that the top level executives of arms manufacturers have a somewhat different attitude towards human life and protecting revenue than you or I do. Such a person may be puzzled by the outrage and actually lack the insight to understand that a single accidental death because of the flawed design would be enough to imperil contracts, because the ratio of intentional fatalities to accidental fatalities is still like 100000 to 1.
That assumes there is an issue to fix. No one has identified an issue that would cause the gun to fire without actuating the trigger.
There was a recent huge thread on HN around the Air Force incident, we now know the guy was playing with the gun, shot and killed someone, then lied about it going off sitting on the table.
If there was some defect that Sig could fix via recall, they would be stupid not to recall. Maybe there is just nothing to fix, and they aren’t stupid.
It's hard to tell what people are talking about when they talk about problems with the P320. The documents in question here deal with, among other things, the drop safety problem rather than uncommanded discharges you're talking about. If we're talking about the drop safety issue, it does make sense to ask why they didn't issue a recall instead of their not-a-recall "voluntary upgrade."
Thanks for the correction, Sig did call it a voluntary upgrade, not a recall. The do have other actual recalls, like on the Sig Cross rifle, so they are willing to do it when there is an issue that calls for it.
https://www.sigsauer.com/blog/safety-recall-notice-sig-sauer...
They would have been in a better spot today to defend the P320 if they had made it a mandatory recall, so they probably should have done it.
Most plausible (not asserting correct), is that a recall in such a context of the civilian variant would have been trouble for the military contract.
The reputation cost will be higher than not recalling for sure.
Their reputation is absolutely shot. It's not just the P320 either, the XM7 and XM5 were also poor choices.
Yeah, I had at least a couple of standard issue Sig Sauer civilian equivalents on my wish list, and now I would never buy anything from them ever.
I had a 365 and traded it in. Wasn't even a good pistol, just small and light. Got a S&W CSX and it's fantastic.
P226 P365 are still excellent
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> It's so weird that SIG didn't just mandate a recall on this issue and dealt with it.
I wouldn't be surprised if gun companies get a constant stream of fake complaints.
I didn't have access to guns when I was a 17-year-old, but if I had I'd certainly have tried twirling them like a movie cowboy. And if I accidentally shot myself while doing that, I certainly wouldn't tell my parents what I was doing at the time, that would make me look like a total dumbass, completely irresponsible. I'd say it went off while I was putting it into my holster, or something.
Then my parents would have complained to the gunmaker, repeating my cover story, and the gunmaker would find it impossible to reproduce or fix.
Perhaps gunmakers don't always realise when they're getting legitimate complaints, because they get so many 'creative' complaints?
If you go to most gunmaker websites often enough, you'll eventually see at least one safety recall notice banner or something similar.
Ruger had one for the SR22 not too long ago. It's a .22 handgun that is more-or-less a range toy. A cool range toy, but a range toy. There was some sort of dead trigger problem that could pose a safety issue. Did Ruger deny it at every turn? No, they put out a notice and offered to fix the firearm free of charge.
Now compare that with how Sig's handled the P320, which is a service pistol and used daily in life-or-death situations.
If you make new-design firearms in any real volume, you will find yourself issuing recalls. Batches of parts get out of spec, things wear out, and you get reports that it can become dangerous. The good gunmakers stand behind their product.
.22 handguns are extremely popular personal defense weapons. Nobody with sense would say they're great at it, but they are nonetheless extremely popular in that role.
If you're in a situation where a gun would help you, a .22 is better than nothing. I mean, I certainly would not want to get shot with a .22.
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The P320 XTEN was on my shortlist, but I am skeptical of buying any product of theirs in the future. There are too many good brands with similar price points to choose from.
These days there are zero practical reasons to buy a Sig for that exact reason
Has anyone tested if the manual safety on the M17/18 has any effect on the interaction chain that leads to uncommanded discharge?
Given this administration, this DOJ, and the Supreme Court. They shouldn’t be sweating bullets (hehe).
though they should if we weren’t living in a simulation. They’re all culpable.
These comments are hysterical to me. Why yes, every government contract with a company that tries to obscure the truth should be canceled. I don't know what country you live in. We don't do things like that here. You get the government contract because you obscured the truth.