In a nutshell, the defect that causes the guns to fire when holstered occurs when there is a small amount of pressure on the trigger. If the slide (top part of the gun) is wiggled / nudged, it will fire. Also, the gun can fire when dropped. Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
potato3732842 · 29m ago
>Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
And just not having hot dog down a hallway tolerances at the slide to frame interface.
The trigger stuff lives in the bottom half of the gun and the bang stuff lives in the top half and only goes bang depending upon the relative position of the trigger stuff. So allowing the top half and the bottom half to move around a ton is generally unwise unless you make accommodations elsewhere in the design so that you still have proper relative position regardless of where in the hallway the hotdog is.
alexpotato · 27m ago
There are videos online showing that this also happens with Glocks (when the trigger is depressed to the wall) [0]
Really, any gun where the sear is in the grip and the part it connects to is in the frame could have the same issue.
I'm pretty sure you're not implying otherwise, but it's an outrageous design flaw regardless and selling these while being aware of the problem (to the military no less!) should carry devastating consequences for the manufacturers.
jabedude · 4m ago
This video does not show a Glock firing with a "small amount of pressure on the trigger", which is what the OP said the issue w/ the P320 is
galangalalgol · 6m ago
So a classic sig double action or 1911 wouldn't be effected? He video says striker fired specifically. Cocked and locked I'm not sure how you would make this happen.
lazide · 26m ago
Also, they’ve had numerous issues with their triggers failing to reset correctly and/or otherwise misbehaving. That was the focus of the original ‘voluntary upgrade’.
That this giant mess of bad tolerances, sloppy change management, iffy manufacturing outsourcing, and a design which is sensitive to these issues it seems inevitable these kinds of random and hard to reproduce problems would occur. And the more they sold, the worse it would get.
Do that in something which literally can cause death and serious injury if it fails, in an environment where all your competitors designs don’t have these issues and hence users tend towards ‘round in the chamber’ and carrying them in all sorts of messy real world situations? Guaranteed disaster eventually.
Bad sig.
The brand was dead to me many years ago (extractor snapped in the middle of a course - seemed like bad metallurgy, or a bad design), but this is entirely another level of crazy.
CodingJeebus · 53m ago
Certainly not the first time something like this happened. During Vietnam, the US Army sent soldiers into combat with the M16 knowing that it had major issues that often caused it to jam. We’ll never know exactly people were killed by such a bad decision, but it quickly became infamous early in the war.[0]
A dishonourable mention for the original A1 version of the British SA80, which required high levels of lubrication to operate properly, and as a result often jammed in sandy environments... like Kuwait and Iraq [1].
I seem to recall the A0 also used to yeet the magazine when you ran with it across your chest on the sling, because the mag release button had no guard (but that might be me misremembering it. )
giantg2 · 46m ago
And the Berretta slide failures. And many similar issues for all kinds of things.
tylerflick · 26m ago
I was going to mention this! I was on a range and watched a slide completely break in half after firing. The Beretta’s where terrible.
eoskx · 37m ago
Here are some follow-ups to the article cited. Pretty wild what Sig's response has been:
> In that statement, the company also blamed the “anti-gun mob” for attacks on the P320.
lol, no words left to describe this.
YesThatTom2 · 30m ago
Then let me suggest some words:
This is the result of the culture of “gun companies can do no wrong / anything negative you say about gun companies means you are a take-mah-guns-away-by-force anti-gun libhahrul” that was intentionally created by well-funded organizations like the NRA.
The NRA got funding from gun manufacturers equivalent to $2 for every gun sold. This aligned incentives to promote gun hoarding and to shit on anyone that said anything bad about the gun industry.
The NRA didn’t used to be like that. It used to primarily be funded by membership dues. Back then it supported reasonable gun safety legislation, gun control, and protecting wildlife (so there would always be sustainable sports hunting). In the 1970s their new leader changed the NRA funding model to aline with the manufacturers, not the gun users. He kicked out the gun safety and education people and replaced them with gun conspiracy nuts. It made the organization richer, and he certainly pocketed a lot of it. He eventually got caught with his hand in the till and served time. However by then it was too late. The US gun culture was ruined and is unfixable because the dialog is now all heat, no light.
This wasn’t an accident. This was by design, planned and funded and executed with determination and purpose.
lazide · 22m ago
Eh, this is someone in SIG leadership using every scapegoat and excuse they can to avoid having to acknowledge or take responsibility for their screwup, instead compounding it to the point where it will seriously hurt the company - maybe even torpedo them.
The things you’re talking about give them some cover/mechanisms, but most other manufacturers are looking on in horror at this, not copying them.
bayindirh · 46m ago
Move briskly and kill people?
That's a deadly twist to "move fast and break things" motto.
Seriously, Sig Sauer. You are making weapons, not disposable pens, and the world leading disposable pen company literally uses "standards x 1.5" as their baseline.
kotaKat · 26m ago
Sig Sauer: “You take some of the shots you don’t make”
eoskx · 35m ago
There's another article that is cited where Sig with someone else was apparently developing the fixes to resolve these issues years before the gun was actually tested with the US Army, but didn't deploy the fixes until they were pressured:
And those "fixes" didn't fully resolve the issues.
poleguy · 33m ago
This article makes me wonder about comparative analysis against other models and brands. It is good Sig Sauer produced a failure mode analysis. Where are the competitive analysis documents?
It also makes me wonder if the reason it can't fix some of these issues is because it is working around patent issues.
Pure speculation.
eoskx · 26m ago
It appears based on some other court documents that Sig with the P320 intentionally excluded a trigger tab safety based on marketing decisions to be competitive, which every other striker-fired handgun has included. That along with some other issues appears to be the basis for where the P320 design went wrong.
lazide · 24m ago
The reason they can’t fix these issues is someone in leadership likely literally has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and is quite literally incapable of acknowledging a mistake or problem. To the point they’ll inevitably torpedo the company rather than take any ownership or responsibility.
If the Board is smart, they’ll fire the person before it gets to that point - but if they were smart, they probably wouldn’t have hired the type of
person to get them into this mess in the first place.
gosub100 · 8m ago
That's not really an Occam's Razor conclusion. I would say the reason is that multiple lawsuits were already filed, and to admit the gun was defective essentially means you lose all the suits overnight. At the time, they chose to ride it out because they didn't know how many of these guns were actually defective.
My guess is it was a perfect storm where the defect rate was low enough to escape their quality control but high enough (or perhaps delayed long enough, meaning it takes years for the defect to appear) to lead to a clear signal after the horse got out of the barn. Enough suits were filed that they perhaps risk bankruptcy if they lose all of them.
That's just my speculation, and seems to be more plausible than some side effect from mental illness.
giantg2 · 34m ago
While I agree with the title of the article, some of the contents seem a little over the top in the way they present them. We would need to see the document to know how bad it really is. Many of the failure modes could be user dependent for lack of training (ie finger in trigger guard when holstering). They also don't say which failure modes were fixed and what remained. That said, all you need is one valid failure mode to be dangerous.
"Sig Sauer also stated that the manual safeties on M17 and M18 pistols would resolve some of the issues,"
This would only be the training dependent ones. Mechanically, the safety only blocks the trigger and does nothing to block the striker or sear.
No comments yet
tehwebguy · 23m ago
I wonder how many people died when police encounters were escalated to “shots fired” by their faulty Sig.
It’s one thing for a gun to go off and potentially hit someone but it’s another when the first round fired triggers 4 cops to empty a mag each.
Esophagus4 · 57m ago
Well that settles it… I’m never buying a Sig Sauer
normie3000 · 57m ago
> multiple ways the pistol could fire without an intentional trigger pull
That doesn't sound ideal.
andrepd · 56m ago
Master of the understatement :)
shepardrtc · 53m ago
Note that not only has Sig Sauer lied about this and attempted to gaslight people[1], they have also sued organizations to force them to continue using the pistol after they chose to discontinue use due to the dangers[2]
Scary to think that I almost bought a P320 before I decided against it for a different reason.
game_the0ry · 14m ago
Even an arms manufacturer with a historic reputation for quality is vulnerable to the phenomena of Enshittification.
jabedude · 8m ago
In this case, the historic reputation for quality is entirely disconnected from the company. SIG USA shares a brand with the German and Swiss companies with the same name, but it is not the same company that made the P226
eoskx · 5m ago
All 3 entities - the German, Swiss, and US entities are owned by a German holding company L&O Holdings, but yes, the basis of the 226 was designed by the original Swiss entity.
eoskx · 2h ago
According to a court exhibit, Sig Sauer identified several deadly risks with its P320 pistols as early as 2017.
And just not having hot dog down a hallway tolerances at the slide to frame interface.
The trigger stuff lives in the bottom half of the gun and the bang stuff lives in the top half and only goes bang depending upon the relative position of the trigger stuff. So allowing the top half and the bottom half to move around a ton is generally unwise unless you make accommodations elsewhere in the design so that you still have proper relative position regardless of where in the hallway the hotdog is.
Really, any gun where the sear is in the grip and the part it connects to is in the frame could have the same issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaV32HarnRY
That this giant mess of bad tolerances, sloppy change management, iffy manufacturing outsourcing, and a design which is sensitive to these issues it seems inevitable these kinds of random and hard to reproduce problems would occur. And the more they sold, the worse it would get.
Do that in something which literally can cause death and serious injury if it fails, in an environment where all your competitors designs don’t have these issues and hence users tend towards ‘round in the chamber’ and carrying them in all sorts of messy real world situations? Guaranteed disaster eventually.
Bad sig.
The brand was dead to me many years ago (extractor snapped in the middle of a course - seemed like bad metallurgy, or a bad design), but this is entirely another level of crazy.
0: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/m16-rifle-viet...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA80
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/the-document-sig-sauer...
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/sig-sauer-vp-consumer-...
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/new-unsealed-sig-sauer...
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/a-year-before-the-army...
lol, no words left to describe this.
This is the result of the culture of “gun companies can do no wrong / anything negative you say about gun companies means you are a take-mah-guns-away-by-force anti-gun libhahrul” that was intentionally created by well-funded organizations like the NRA.
The NRA got funding from gun manufacturers equivalent to $2 for every gun sold. This aligned incentives to promote gun hoarding and to shit on anyone that said anything bad about the gun industry.
The NRA didn’t used to be like that. It used to primarily be funded by membership dues. Back then it supported reasonable gun safety legislation, gun control, and protecting wildlife (so there would always be sustainable sports hunting). In the 1970s their new leader changed the NRA funding model to aline with the manufacturers, not the gun users. He kicked out the gun safety and education people and replaced them with gun conspiracy nuts. It made the organization richer, and he certainly pocketed a lot of it. He eventually got caught with his hand in the till and served time. However by then it was too late. The US gun culture was ruined and is unfixable because the dialog is now all heat, no light.
This wasn’t an accident. This was by design, planned and funded and executed with determination and purpose.
The things you’re talking about give them some cover/mechanisms, but most other manufacturers are looking on in horror at this, not copying them.
That's a deadly twist to "move fast and break things" motto.
Seriously, Sig Sauer. You are making weapons, not disposable pens, and the world leading disposable pen company literally uses "standards x 1.5" as their baseline.
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/a-year-before-the-army...
It also makes me wonder if the reason it can't fix some of these issues is because it is working around patent issues.
Pure speculation.
If the Board is smart, they’ll fire the person before it gets to that point - but if they were smart, they probably wouldn’t have hired the type of person to get them into this mess in the first place.
My guess is it was a perfect storm where the defect rate was low enough to escape their quality control but high enough (or perhaps delayed long enough, meaning it takes years for the defect to appear) to lead to a clear signal after the horse got out of the barn. Enough suits were filed that they perhaps risk bankruptcy if they lose all of them.
That's just my speculation, and seems to be more plausible than some side effect from mental illness.
"Sig Sauer also stated that the manual safeties on M17 and M18 pistols would resolve some of the issues,"
This would only be the training dependent ones. Mechanically, the safety only blocks the trigger and does nothing to block the striker or sear.
No comments yet
It’s one thing for a gun to go off and potentially hit someone but it’s another when the first round fired triggers 4 cops to empty a mag each.
That doesn't sound ideal.
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[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DG6RkWCpkdw/#
[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/gunmaker-sues-washingtons-p...