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 · 1h 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.
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 · 10m 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.
> In this case, the whole "it want off by itself" claim was a lie.
That's the Air Force's accusation.
anikom15 · 1m ago
A literal definition of commenting without reading the article
michaelcampbell · 1h 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 · 21m ago
We would need a government body whose mission is to act in the people's interest. Maybe someday.
lenerdenator · 1h 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 · 32m 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 · 19m 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 · 5m 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.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 1h 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 · 36m 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 · 1m 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.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 34m ago
There were no standard trials for the M18 so Sig didn't even need magical sample guns.
eoskx · 59m ago
Despite the name of the website, it is focused on journalistic aspects of the firearms industry, but point taken.
jeffwask · 28m 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.
A_D_E_P_T · 1h 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.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 1h 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 · 51m 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 · 47m 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.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 37m 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.
4MOAisgoodenuf · 47m 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 · 13m 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 ).
gigatexal · 3m 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.
chuckadams · 1h ago
Fine, seems then that there's pretty good grounds for cancelling every one of Sig's contracts for national security reasons.
giancarlostoro · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 43m 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 · 1h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
A manual safety that does not seem to prevent uncommanded discharges. Which is, y'know, part of the point of a safety.
coldbrewed · 1h 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 · 3m ago
The M17/M18/P320 has a striker block, and you have to pull the trigger to disengage it.
dfc · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
No comments yet
bob1029 · 1h ago
Something like an MP5 is going to be far more ergonomic in situations where one might find this kind of sidearm useful.
dylan604 · 1h ago
what would be the point other than to just waste bullets?
Zigurd · 1h 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 · 17m 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 44s 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.
TrippyAcidCats · 1h ago
Bullet volume is very important for suppression. Although the role of suppression usually is filled by a SAW rather than a MP.
dylan604 · 1h 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 · 23m 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.
t-3 · 1h ago
You can hit your monthly training quota way quicker.
justin66 · 1h 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.
firesteelrain · 1h ago
Unless the Army is invoking CTI/CUI this will be hard to defend
spacephysics · 2h 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 · 1h ago
Agree. The remedy for this is federal disbarment.
dole · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
Universal human rights only exist so far as men with guns are willing to defend them.
netbioserror · 1h ago
Has anyone tested if the manual safety on the M17/18 has any effect on the interaction chain that leads to uncommanded discharge?
IlikeKitties · 1h 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.
Edman274 · 1h 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.
avidiax · 1h 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 · 9m 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
jibe · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 42m 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
andrewmcwatters · 1h ago
The reputation cost will be higher than not recalling for sure.
pensatoio · 1h ago
Their reputation is absolutely shot. It's not just the P320 either, the XM7 and XM5 were also poor choices.
andrewmcwatters · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 44m ago
P226 P365 are still excellent
msarrel · 1h 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.
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...
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.
That's the Air Force's accusation.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
though they should if we weren’t living in a simulation. They’re all culpable.
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).
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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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.
What is NOT a meme, and is useful, but counts as fully automatic, is three or five round burst mode.
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.
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.
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.