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.
jjani · 29m ago
> 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.
buildbot · 12m ago
More like just a bad, open ended pipe bomb! A grenade is supposed to be more safe than this gun too!
lenerdenator · 3h ago
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.
shepardrtc · 3h ago
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.
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.
> 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.
dlachausse · 1h ago
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.
mothballed · 2m ago
Lol try conceal carrying or outside the waistband carrying without ever pointing a loaded handgun at something you don't want to kill. It is pretty much impossible, unless you're using a pretty unusual holster. A waistband holster will pretty much always end up pointing it towards some part of your body at some point, and even a shoulder holster it is pointing at someone else.
Carrying a handgun relies on that rule not being followed and instead the holster preventing anyone from pulling the trigger, but if the gun can go off without a trigger pull all bets are off.
runjake · 42m ago
Right. But we don't know any of those details, so it's just conjecture at this point. We shouldn't form opinions based on very limited information.
0xffff2 · 2h ago
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?
dragonwriter · 1h ago
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.
0xffff2 · 41m ago
Interesting. I looked up the UCMJ articles for manslaughter and murder, and the language is actually quite plain; reads to me like you are obviously correct that this case would clearly be involuntary manslaughter.
Really? I thought heat-of-passion killing was indeed murder. Whereas voluntary manslaughter is more like when you punch someone in the face and they crack their head on a curb and die. You intended to hurt them, but you had absolutely no intent to kill.
But IANAL, and to the extent I pay attention to the law, that kind of basic criminal law isn't it.
0xffff2 · 39m ago
I linked the UCMJ articles in a sibling comment. I think gp's description is correct for the UCMJ. Part of the problem IMO is that there are ~52 definitions of manslaughter/murder in the US (one for every state, civilian federal law and the UCMJ) so that answer is always highly context specific.
devilbunny · 37m ago
Thanks. I didn't consider UCMJ.
dghlsakjg · 1h ago
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.
shepardrtc · 2h ago
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.
jibe · 2h ago
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.
vmh1928 · 2h ago
The issue is the gun goes off by itself without the trigger being pulled. Remember that all this type of gun has the firing pin under spring tension all the time. The only thing keeping it from firing is a latch mechanism that is supposed to only activate when the trigger is pulled but if the mechanism is defective and too close to the edge the latch can disengage without the trigger being pulled or touched. There are numerous YT videos of this occurring.
jibe · 1h ago
There is no evidence of this, no reproduction of it firing without the trigger being pulled, and not even a good theory on it. The YouTube videos are involve pulling the trigger far enough to disengage the internal safeties.
A hair trigger is unsuitable for police security use because guns are routinely drawn on people as a threat to exact compliance.
A hair trigger is unsuitable for combat use because of the "errybody be muzzle sweeping errybody up in here" nature of combat.
Those two uses are 99.99% of what the air force needs its pistols to do.
They could give it better tolerances so it has a "good trigger" without "hair trigger" but that will cost a lot of money. Or they could give it an absurd trigger pull like duty guns had in the "good old days" but that will cost just as much money for equivalent results because you'll need to train the force more to get the same accuracy of fire.
Additionally, with the fairly sloppy nature of these guns and the fundamental nature of how handguns work, it's not unforeseeable that they do get clapped out to the point of just going off if you bump the slide right as they age since they're so close to that as is.
Considering how many people need to be trained/equipped and how often the air force fires sidearms in "real" situations both of these solutions are way, way, way more expensive than a few bodies.
jibe · 1h ago
1: It isn't a hair trigger, it is still a 6 to 6.5 pound pull.
2: The trigger is what it is, the military and police departments chose it for what was.
I agree, the police in particular, should use a gun that takes more effort to fire. But don't blame Sig for this, it isn't a design flaw.
jakogut · 17m ago
The P320 absolutely has design and manufacturing flaws. The P250 fire control unit was shoehorned into a striker fired pistol when they should've gone back to the drawing board like they did with the P365, which doesn't have these issues.
There are also manufacturing issues with intermingling parts with different geometries intended for different calibers and building guns with the wrong parts, such as installing a 10mm Auto/.45 ACP takedown safety level in a 9mm gun, or installing a metal injection molded firing pin safety that's out of spec, worn, or contributes to tolerance stacking in such a way that the gun becomes unsafe.
There is nothing in there except a sensational headline. The military asked Sig to come up with every possible theoretical failure mode for the gun, and assess the risk. There is nothing about a specific flaw that would cause the gun to fire uncommanded. The document is being misrepresented here.
lazide · 1h ago
I’ve seen multiple security videos of P320’s going off in holsters in the field with no plausible way anyone or anything could have pulled the trigger.
pnw · 1h ago
The police video where two officers are wrestling with a suspect, one officer has a large hanging key fob on the front of his belt which enters the other officers Safariland holster as they wrestle, and pulls the trigger.
The range video where they are standing on the line was allegedly a modified gun with non-Sig upper and trigger.
jibe · 1h ago
I understand what it looks like, but we have the guns from those incidents, and no one has looked at them an pointed to a defect, or reproduced them firing without the trigger being actuated.
A gun in a holster can fire when it is moved and the holster is poorly fit, incorrectly configured, or there anything caught in it like tail of a shirt, drawstring. Also, many police have a flashlight on their pistol, which opens up space quite a bit making it easier for things to get caught inside.
There is a giant screw jammed in the trigger. That disengages the internal safeties. That's not showing the gun is not safe, that is intentionally making it unsafe. That provides no insight as to whether the gun can fire uncommanded, without moving the trigger, which is the claim.
jakogut · 13m ago
Right, a Glock will do this too. IvanPrintsGuns on YouTube demonstrated this.
> In this case, the whole "it want off by itself" claim was a lie.
That's the Air Force's accusation.
albedoa · 1h ago
> 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.
dlachausse · 1h ago
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.
jakogut · 11m ago
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.
lazide · 1h ago
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.
lupusreal · 42m ago
Yes, the US military has been known to throw people under the bus to cover up their own fuck ups.
> 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.
mothballed · 11m ago
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.
michaelcampbell · 3h ago
> 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.
kevin_thibedeau · 2h ago
We would need a government body whose mission is to act in the people's interest. Maybe someday.
wiml · 45m ago
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.
lenerdenator · 3h ago
Well, I should have specified, there's no good reason for no investigation.
Personally my money's on corruption but I have no proof.
jakogut · 2h ago
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.
SauciestGNU · 2h ago
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.
aerostable_slug · 2h ago
And Sig is responding to .mil requirements, just like the other companies who introduced similar cartridges. It makes no sense to assert they're the ones forcing it on the military. The military asked for it.
The requirements may be goofy, but that's a requirements problem and not a Sig problem.
lazide · 1h ago
And if it turns out that someone in the committee made those requirements almost custom for Sig’s projects, and was either buddies with someone in SIG, or went to work for SIG later? As happens all the time in military procurement?
SauciestGNU · 2h ago
Fair enough, but goofy they are.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 3h ago
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"
bombcar · 2h ago
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.
jakogut · 2h ago
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.
kstrauser · 1h ago
I’m asking out of complete ignorance here, and I’d like to learn. Why don’t these have nearly perfect safety mechanisms? To my naive mind, it seems easy to add a push button that comes between the striker and bullet, or locks the striker in place. Obviously it’s not that trivial or they’d probably have done it. Why is that?
I’ve owned rifles that had safeties that made it impossible to pull the trigger. Don’t these?
jakogut · 1h ago
I glossed over parts of this mechanism above, but partially pre-cocked strikers require the trigger bar to pull the striker back more before the trigger bar drops down, releasing the striker. The amount the striker is pre-cocked is not enough to ignite a primer, and the act of pulling the striker back against spring pressure mimics the sear geometry of a hammer fired gun.
Fully cocked strikers are ready to ignite a primer if the striker drops. I don't know of another design like Sig's that has a fully cocked striker, which is not to say there isn't one, or that they're all unsafe.
The P320 in particular suffers from compromises shoehorning a fire control unit designed for one gun into another.
Combined with poor manufacturing techniques, tolerance stacking, part mixing, and poor QA, the striker block, which is the last safety intended to block the striker without an explicit trigger pull, can become ineffective.
To answer your question, there's no mechanical reason a handgun cannot be designed an manufactured to not fire without explicit mechanical input from the user. Indeed almost every commercially produced handgun on the market fits this requirement. A combination of failures on Sig's part has allowed this to happen.
bombcar · 1h ago
As mentioned it is possible to make double or even triple safe (or more).
But some of the types of safeties increase the change you won’t have it on (because time to disengage the safety is too long/complicated) or that they will introduce additional failure modes.
For some missions, “unsafe” is better than “too safe” - think one step from gun drawn, finger on the trigger.
This is one of the reasons Glocks are so popular, as the trigger safety is really “easy” to disengage as it’s the same as the mechanism you use to fire.
But it doesn’t protect YOU from being a dumbass. Safeties that do that are dangerous in another way.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 2h ago
There were no standard trials for the M18 so Sig didn't even need magical sample guns.
tracker1 · 2h ago
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.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 1h ago
For the XM17 program that ended up adopting the P320, the military skipped their normal production verification testing.
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.
aerostable_slug · 1h ago
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.
seanw444 · 4m ago
We really do live in a lame version of a cyberpunk dystopia, don't we.
ubunthree · 2h ago
Not powder but many other failures in a particular model of the Vietnam era m16:
(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.)
4MOAisgoodenuf · 1h ago
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)
eoskx · 3h ago
Despite the name of the website, it is focused on journalistic aspects of the firearms industry, but point taken.
No comments yet
anikom15 · 2h ago
A literal definition of commenting without reading the article
jeffwask · 2h ago
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.
some_random · 19m ago
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.
eoskx · 16m ago
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.
some_random · 11m ago
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.
eoskx · 7m ago
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.
tracker1 · 2h ago
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.
CodeWriter23 · 1h ago
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.
tgsovlerkhgsel · 1h ago
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.
kstrauser · 1h ago
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.
otterley · 1h ago
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.
bigyabai · 1h ago
And when the OEM finds a vulnerability and withholds it, that's just "doing business" here in the states.
tracker1 · 1h ago
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.
cosmicgadget · 29m ago
Unless you have an earthquake machine.
stevemk14ebr · 45m ago
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.
monster_truck · 43m ago
I'll believe that when they take down the innumberable youtube videos demonstraiting it clearly
A_D_E_P_T · 3h ago
I don't like linking to YouTube videos, but this one is a must-see if you're interested in the Sig debacle:
Handgun design doesn't really get any worse than that.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 10m ago
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.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 3h ago
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.
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."
WillPostForFood · 3h ago
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.
kryogen1c · 3h ago
> 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.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 6m ago
I can't imagine a realistic scenario where I've taken the slack out of a trigger and don't have the intent to continue pulling through to the break.
Modern military doctrine says that you shouldn't even pull the weapon from the holster if you don't have the intent to fire. Even if you're not quite willing to implement that (eg for LE), you shouldn't be touching/pulling the trigger without an extremely firm intent to fire.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 2h ago
Pulling the trigger deactivates the firing-pin safety and drop-safety on a Glock as well. And by the time you have pulled the trigger to the wall you've already disabled the trigger-blade safety.
This holds true on basically every modern handgun that has such a mechanism (striker or hammer-fired).
The Sig P320 probably has more issues than the originally discovered drop-safety deficiencies, and Sig US has been very quick to deny-deny-deny. But firing when you pull the trigger is not an issue.
beAbU · 1h ago
Glocks require such an astronomically large trigger pull to disable the safety that there cannot be any doubt that the trigger was intentionally pulled with the intention of making it fire.
The glock that I used to compete regularly with basically felt like a double action revolver.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 1h ago
OEM trigger pull weight on most all Glocks is about 5.5lbs (the G34 has a different connector and gets down to about 4.5lbs)
That is fairly average across the market for other handguns.
Unless you were shooting a Glock with one of the infamous NYPD 12lb triggers…
kryogen1c · 2h ago
> But firing when you pull the trigger is not an issue.
This is not a fair and accurate phrasing of the problem. Triggers have a breakpoint in the pull at which you expect them to fire. Discharging by touching the slide, even while the trigger is depressed, is not expected or acceptable.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 1h ago
If you pull the trigger far enough to disengage the drop safety and firing pin safety block, then it is entirely possible to discharge the weapon by applying force to the slide, shaking the weapon, or the like. Pulling the trigger disables the internal safeties that would prevent this.
This is not unique to the P320, Sig, or even striker-fired handguns in general. This could just as easily apply to a CZ-75B. There is no magic that keeps the striker from dropping until the shooter has their heart set on discharging a round.
There is a reason that rule #3 of firearm safety is to not put your finger on the trigger until you're ready to shoot
lazide · 1h ago
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.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 3h ago
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.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 · 2h ago
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 ).
chuckadams · 4h ago
Fine, seems then that there's pretty good grounds for cancelling every one of Sig's contracts for national security reasons.
JodieBenitez · 1h ago
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.
aerostable_slug · 1h ago
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.
12-pound duty trigger is absolutely wild. I wonder how many cases of collateral injuries there were because of it.
giancarlostoro · 4h ago
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.
wl · 4h ago
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.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 3h ago
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).
wl · 3h ago
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.
eoskx · 3h ago
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.
eoskx · 4h ago
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.
justin66 · 3h ago
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).
lenerdenator · 3h ago
A manual safety that does not seem to prevent uncommanded discharges. Which is, y'know, part of the point of a safety.
coldbrewed · 3h ago
Yep, the fact that the safety merely blocks the trigger and doesn't block the striker in case of accidental sear disengagement is horrifying.
jibe · 2h ago
The M17/M18/P320 has a striker block, and you have to pull the trigger to disengage it.
justin66 · 3h ago
> 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.
dfc · 4h ago
Does any service in the world have a standard issue full auto handgun?
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.
bluedino · 4h ago
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.
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SoftTalker · 1h ago
Not "standard issue" but a Glock with a switch is an example.
what would be the point other than to just waste bullets?
Zigurd · 3h ago
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.
calmbonsai · 2h ago
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.
Wickedflickr · 3h ago
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.
someguydave · 3h ago
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
t-3 · 3h ago
Full auto is just going to run through your ammo at the expense of accuracy, reliability, and maintenance time and costs. Nobody is going to be providing covering fire with a fully-auto machine pistol, the ammo capacity just isn't big enough (and then think about cooling and mechanism reliability when putting more than a dozen through a handgun). These things are for raids and assassinations, where collateral damage isn't a big deal but taking out the target is.
lupusreal · 2h ago
That's nice "just so" theory, but is contradicted by the reality that the US Secret Service has been known to use concealed Uzi's, and presumably similar compact full auto weapons, in bodyguard roles.
someguydave is correct. Compact automatic weapons make sense for highly trained body guards protecting VIPs when discretion is considered important.
TrippyAcidCats · 3h ago
Bullet volume is very important for suppression. Although the role of suppression usually is filled by a SAW rather than a MP.
dylan604 · 3h ago
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
bombcar · 2h ago
Full-auto anything that isn’t a chaingun is basically a meme anyway, even for rifles and friends.
What is NOT a meme, and is useful, but counts as fully automatic, is three or five round burst mode.
lupusreal · 2h ago
I don't think you even know what a "chain gun" is. Where did you get this information from, reddit and video games?
Chainguns are a type of autocannon. Heavy, light and general purpose machine guns, like the M2 Browning, M249 SAW, Maxim, Been Gun, MG3, etc... none of these are chain guns. They aren't even all belt fed, which I guess is what you meant to say because I think that's the videogame midwit lingo. They are nonetheless universally accepted as being very valuable in combat.
t-3 · 3h ago
You can hit your monthly training quota way quicker.
bob1029 · 3h ago
Something like an MP5 is going to be far more ergonomic in situations where one might find this kind of sidearm useful.
dole · 59m ago
Would also be a lot cooler and reliable than putting anything more than two magazines through an 18C or 93R.
3eb7988a1663 · 2h ago
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?
gwwolf · 1h ago
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.
aerostable_slug · 1h ago
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).
lazide · 1h ago
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.
firesteelrain · 4h ago
Unless the Army is invoking CTI/CUI this will be hard to defend
spacephysics · 4h ago
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.
souterrain · 4h ago
Agree. The remedy for this is federal disbarment.
dole · 3h ago
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.
skeezyboy · 3h ago
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?
chrisco255 · 3h ago
Universal human rights only exist so far as men with guns are willing to defend them.
unethical_ban · 2h ago
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.
IlikeKitties · 4h ago
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.
avidiax · 3h ago
> 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.
cmcaleer · 2h ago
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.
jibe · 3h ago
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.
bradyd · 3h ago
They didn't actually do a recall for that. Instead it was a "voluntary upgrade" program. That is also not a less serious issue.
Edman274 · 3h ago
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.
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jibe · 3h ago
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.
wl · 3h ago
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."
jibe · 3h ago
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.
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.
privatelypublic · 3h ago
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.
michaelt · 3h ago
> 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?
lenerdenator · 3h ago
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.
lupusreal · 2h ago
.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.
SoftTalker · 1h ago
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.
andrewmcwatters · 4h ago
The reputation cost will be higher than not recalling for sure.
pensatoio · 3h ago
Their reputation is absolutely shot. It's not just the P320 either, the XM7 and XM5 were also poor choices.
andrewmcwatters · 3h ago
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.
shepardrtc · 3h ago
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.
esseph · 3h ago
P226 P365 are still excellent
pensatoio · 2h ago
Love my P365, but I'm not buying another product from Sig after the P320. I can't trust them to make a dangerous tool in a safe and reliable manner.
netbioserror · 3h ago
Has anyone tested if the manual safety on the M17/18 has any effect on the interaction chain that leads to uncommanded discharge?
gigatexal · 2h ago
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.
msarrel · 4h ago
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.
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.
If this isn't satisfied you haven't made a gun, you've made a really shitty grenade.
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.
- 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-...
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...
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.
It can be both Sig and this Airman’s fault at the same time.
Carrying a handgun relies on that rule not being followed and instead the holster preventing anyone from pulling the trigger, but if the gun can go off without a trigger pull all bets are off.
In case anyone else is interested:
UCMJ Article 119 (Manslaughter): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/919
UCML Article 118 (Murder): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/918
But IANAL, and to the extent I pay attention to the law, that kind of basic criminal law isn't it.
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.
https://youtube.com/shorts/cOUfurKIjnI
A hair trigger is unsuitable for combat use because of the "errybody be muzzle sweeping errybody up in here" nature of combat.
Those two uses are 99.99% of what the air force needs its pistols to do.
They could give it better tolerances so it has a "good trigger" without "hair trigger" but that will cost a lot of money. Or they could give it an absurd trigger pull like duty guns had in the "good old days" but that will cost just as much money for equivalent results because you'll need to train the force more to get the same accuracy of fire.
Additionally, with the fairly sloppy nature of these guns and the fundamental nature of how handguns work, it's not unforeseeable that they do get clapped out to the point of just going off if you bump the slide right as they age since they're so close to that as is.
Considering how many people need to be trained/equipped and how often the air force fires sidearms in "real" situations both of these solutions are way, way, way more expensive than a few bodies.
2: The trigger is what it is, the military and police departments chose it for what was.
I agree, the police in particular, should use a gun that takes more effort to fire. But don't blame Sig for this, it isn't a design flaw.
There are also manufacturing issues with intermingling parts with different geometries intended for different calibers and building guns with the wrong parts, such as installing a 10mm Auto/.45 ACP takedown safety level in a 9mm gun, or installing a metal injection molded firing pin safety that's out of spec, worn, or contributes to tolerance stacking in such a way that the gun becomes unsafe.
The range video where they are standing on the line was allegedly a modified gun with non-Sig upper and trigger.
A gun in a holster can fire when it is moved and the holster is poorly fit, incorrectly configured, or there anything caught in it like tail of a shirt, drawstring. Also, many police have a flashlight on their pistol, which opens up space quite a bit making it easier for things to get caught inside.
https://youtu.be/r1KoSBcn2bY
That's the Air Force's accusation.
This might be true, but nowhere in the article you posted does it say that.
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.
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.
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.
Cynically, there's a very good reason they haven't. Embarrassment, money, entitlement... lots of reasons, actually.
Personally my money's on corruption but I have no proof.
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 requirements may be goofy, but that's a requirements problem and not a Sig problem.
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.
I’ve owned rifles that had safeties that made it impossible to pull the trigger. Don’t these?
Fully cocked strikers are ready to ignite a primer if the striker drops. I don't know of another design like Sig's that has a fully cocked striker, which is not to say there isn't one, or that they're all unsafe.
The P320 in particular suffers from compromises shoehorning a fire control unit designed for one gun into another.
Combined with poor manufacturing techniques, tolerance stacking, part mixing, and poor QA, the striker block, which is the last safety intended to block the striker without an explicit trigger pull, can become ineffective.
To answer your question, there's no mechanical reason a handgun cannot be designed an manufactured to not fire without explicit mechanical input from the user. Indeed almost every commercially produced handgun on the market fits this requirement. A combination of failures on Sig's part has allowed this to happen.
But some of the types of safeties increase the change you won’t have it on (because time to disengage the safety is too long/complicated) or that they will introduce additional failure modes.
For some missions, “unsafe” is better than “too safe” - think one step from gun drawn, finger on the trigger.
This is one of the reasons Glocks are so popular, as the trigger safety is really “easy” to disengage as it’s the same as the mechanism you use to fire.
But it doesn’t protect YOU from being a dumbass. Safeties that do that are dangerous in another way.
See: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/07/05/glock-says-be...
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.
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.)
The biggest difference is about 20 years of industrial development (moving from stamped/milled steel to aluminum)
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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.
I do agree with your assessment of quality between the companies, though.
I could see the argument in the early 1900's, but today that's absolutely ridiculous on its face.
The only "national security issue" is that it's embarrassing.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOMQOtOQoPk
Handgun design doesn't really get any worse than that.
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
> "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."
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.
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.
Modern military doctrine says that you shouldn't even pull the weapon from the holster if you don't have the intent to fire. Even if you're not quite willing to implement that (eg for LE), you shouldn't be touching/pulling the trigger without an extremely firm intent to fire.
This holds true on basically every modern handgun that has such a mechanism (striker or hammer-fired).
The Sig P320 probably has more issues than the originally discovered drop-safety deficiencies, and Sig US has been very quick to deny-deny-deny. But firing when you pull the trigger is not an issue.
The glock that I used to compete regularly with basically felt like a double action revolver.
That is fairly average across the market for other handguns.
Unless you were shooting a Glock with one of the infamous NYPD 12lb triggers…
This is not a fair and accurate phrasing of the problem. Triggers have a breakpoint in the pull at which you expect them to fire. Discharging by touching the slide, even while the trigger is depressed, is not expected or acceptable.
This is not unique to the P320, Sig, or even striker-fired handguns in general. This could just as easily apply to a CZ-75B. There is no magic that keeps the striker from dropping until the shooter has their heart set on discharging a round.
There is a reason that rule #3 of firearm safety is to not put your finger on the trigger until you're ready to shoot
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.
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.
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...
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glock_switch
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.
someguydave is correct. Compact automatic weapons make sense for highly trained body guards protecting VIPs when discretion is considered important.
What is NOT a meme, and is useful, but counts as fully automatic, is three or five round burst mode.
Chainguns are a type of autocannon. Heavy, light and general purpose machine guns, like the M2 Browning, M249 SAW, Maxim, Been Gun, MG3, etc... none of these are chain guns. They aren't even all belt fed, which I guess is what you meant to say because I think that's the videogame midwit lingo. They are nonetheless universally accepted as being very valuable in combat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
though they should if we weren’t living in a simulation. They’re all culpable.