This is a completely incorrect interpretation of a FMEA (failure-modes-and-effects-analysis) / "Risk Chart". ISO quality systems regulations / the army mandate engineers sit in a room and dream up every way the device could fail and/or harm someone. You then classify the risk of that harm, so in all cases an unintentional discharge would be "high risk". This does not mean the pistol has a high chance of discharging, that is a separate metric for odds of occurrence. Even if the pistol was redesigned to only have a 1 in a million chance of unintentionally discharging, the "risk" category would stay "high".
The Risk Assessment Matrix Level (right most column) takes the incidence x severity into account. Even after mitigations, there were quite a few "Medium"s, almost all of which were E-1 ("Improbable: So unlikely, it can be
assumed occurrence may not be experienced in the life of an item, .0001% Occurrence per item" x "Catastrophic: Could result in one or more of the following: death....")
I agree. FMEA has separate fields for likelihood of occurrence and severity of occurrence. I agree with this in that the severity of occurrence is high/critical. The likelihood, I don't think it described that well.
To put an analogy, I've participated in FMEA's for software systems and the underlying physical installation. The severity of losing your class A data center due to flooding or complete power loss for over 48 hours is critical. The likelihood is low depending on the data centers location.
Question is how likely were the unintentional discharge scenarios in this FMEA study?
The harm is always a property of the failure, independent from the likelihood. The combination of the two independent values is usually a lookup in a grid to some score. I’m not gonna look at an FMEA in my leasure time, but if there was something juicy it’d be in the article text and it didn’t convince me.
"The Smoking Gun" is part of the Everytown Support Fund [0], which has been lobbying for gun abolitionism. It was created in opposition of the NRA by Michael Bloomberg [1]
Just like how the NRA would skew stats against any form of gun control, an organization like Everytown would skew facts the other way around.
Firearm abolitionism and unrestricted firearm access are both equally dumb.
There is a middle ground that can be found, but the extremes on both sides make it impossible to compromise. Gun ownership is a 2nd amendment right and often needed in areas with limited population density and access to police or animal control services (try dealing with packs of feral hog like most rural communities in the American West - can't be done without .223 calibre ammo), but that doesn't mean we can't add safety and training requirements given that there is a real issue with gun smuggling that is exacerbating crime across the Americas as well as the inability to prevent and flag high risk individuals from purchasing weapons (especially via private sales).
IMO, an Israeli style model would be best - Israelis are allowed to own a private weapon, but are required to get tested and recertified every year AND need to show that they have a gun locker. All weapons are also registered and cataloged, and all gun sales need to be notified and allowed by the Ministry of Public Safety.
If Israel can do it, the US absolutely can as well.
The Swiss model would be a much more reasonable approach. Shall-issue purchase permit on passing a background check, and the requirement to keep the firearm locked up when not used. But if you live alone, your locked front door counts as "locked up."
Statistically, the problem isn't keeping scary guns away from everyone, because the vast majority of people will never shoot anyone. The whole "you're more likely to shoot a household member than an intruder" is a red herring, because the vast majority will do neither of these things. What matters is disarming the suicidally depressed, as well as a subset of people who are disproportionately likely to commit violent crime. 60-85 percent of gun deaths in the US are suicides, jurisdiction dependent. The prototypical gun homicide in the US is a young minority man with a criminal record being killed by another young minority man with a criminal record using an illegally-possessed handgun, usually involving street gang disputes and/or the illegal drug trade.
So what matters is being able to disarm people who exhibit violent tendencies and/or suicidal depression "left of bang."
> The Swiss model would be a much more reasonable approach. Shall-issue purchase permit on passing a background check, and the requirement to keep the firearm locked up when not used. But if you live alone, your locked front door counts as "locked up."
Except Washington has rolled out broad-based bans which statistically do nothing except harass law-abiding citizens. I live in Greater Seattle, and the vibe seems to be much more "ban them all" than "how do we responsibly have these tools in society." The attitude here towards guns is as irrational as the attitude in Mississippi towards people having gay sex.
The Swiss will sell you your service rifle converted to semi-auto when you leave the military, yet somehow these "assault weapons" don't cause them problems.
The Swiss also have compulsory military service for every man over 18 (women may volunteer), so the people owning these guns actually know how to handle them safely and have been trained to have some self-discipline.
I expect that the 18 week bootcamp affords an opportunity to closely observe all such conscripts and screen them for mental health disorders and behavioral problems, and that the (minimum) of 7 years of reserve service allows ongoing monitoring.
Additionally, common sense tells me that Switzerland's equivalent of "dishonorable" or "other-than-honorable" discharge would result in that person not having the opportunity to buy their service rifle, and possibly putting up roadblocks to owning a gun at all.
Therefore the people in Switzerland most likely to cause gun crime do not have ready access to them. That is quite different to how we think about it in the US.
If you were to seriously propose such a system in the US, I think you would get far more opposition from the pro-gun groups than the anti-gun groups. In fact, anti-gun groups would welcome adopting the Swiss system, since it so closes matches the legislation they have tried to enact such as magazine size restrictions in California, "red flag" laws in other states, and mandatory trigger locks. All of those laws have been opposed by groups like the NRA.
Neither do so-called "assault weapons." You're statistically more likely to have someone beat you to death with their bare fists and feet. Do you go around worrying about that every day? I don't.
Nothing is gained by conflating unrelated topics like suicide, gang violence, domestic violence, and the occasional deranged lunatic spree killer just because they all abused the same tool to commit murder.
But if you don't muddy the water like that how are you supposed to demonize guns??
Unfortunately, most people are more interested in the simple answer than in recognizing there is no simple answer. And people are remarkably poor at recognizing that those who are muddying the waters are almost certainly arguing a false position.
Washington is a must-issue concealed carry state though. When working at Microsoft I had to sign something saying I’d keep my gun in my car when on campus.
> So what matters is being able to disarm people who exhibit violent tendencies and/or suicidal depression "left of bang."
I agree
> The Swiss model would be a much more reasonable approach. Shall-issue purchase permit on passing a background check, and the requirement to keep the firearm locked up when not used. But if you live alone, your locked front door counts as "locked up."
I disagree simply because unlike CH, our neighboring states like Mexico, Haiti, and Jamaica are all facing severe public security issues due to US originated gun trafficking, and this blows back into the US.
Adding some additional securitization to our rules more in line with those in Israel allow us to help defend ourselves from contagion.
If the party that support the 2nd amendment also views organized crime in Mexico and Haiti as a national security risk, then using the securitization framing is an easier sell.
I'd argue Mexico, Haiti, and Jamaica are facing severe public security issues because they're failed states run by the stupid and corrupt. The guns probably make it a little worse, ja.
You can drop the weapons catalog requirement that Israel has, and you would still add significant guardrails against misuse.
Even without Israeli style gun cataloging, the rest of the Israeli gun control requirements should be able to pass the "objective criteria" test from Buren while also reducing the risk of misuse by tying license ownership with criterias such as mental health, training, and access to safe storage.
Oh, I entirely agree. It just seems absolutely nuts that the US government (or rather the state governments, because ultimately they'd be dealing with it) cannot attribute a gun to a purchase because they've specifically made it illegal to do so.
When you're dealing with that mindset, no wonder gun control measures as unremarkable as mandatory safes and training are anathema.
The basic problem is that a list of guns is the holy grail of the gun banners. Is it any wonder that the pro gun crowd is afraid of it?
And the reality is that legally purchased guns account for a tiny fraction of gun crime. Stopping every gun purchase by even a would-be criminal is going to do very little except to the suicide rate.
And the "unremarkable" measures often have nasty hidden details. Mandatory safes? Just exactly what do you count as a safe? Doesn't take much of a requirement on a safe before it becomes something that can only rest upon a proper foundation--thus completely prohibiting many apartment and condo dwellers. Put a bolt-down requirement on it and you have disallowed all renters.
Training is looking at it backwards. We have a perfect model of how it should be handled: just look at driving. You pass a test of knowledge and a test of proficiency.
The federal statute only prohibits the AG from promulgating a rule that would require the feds or the states from maintaining a registry. While unconstitutional, many states already have one such as CA, CT, DC, HI, MD, MI, NJ, NY.
As a former legislative assistant during the Aurora shooting, it's because gun abolitionists and gun fundamentalists are extremely organized interest groups, and risk your chances during a primary.
There is a silent majority that feels the 2nd amendment and gun control can co-exist, but they are not represented by any type of organized lobbying group so that voice is not heard.
It's also become a culture war signifier, so if you are a D who is fine with controlled gun ownership instead of abolition, you will face severe lobbying from Everytown, and if you are a R who is fine with controlled permitting instead of maximalist shall-issue licensing, you will face severe lobbying from the NRA.
And herein lies a clear demonstration of the problem.
A firing pin is designed to slam metal into metal. Do you really think a detailed pattern on the end of the pin will not soon become too blurred to be useful? Even if somebody doesn't take an abrasive to it.
And it's not like a firing pin is somehow unique to the gun. They are wear items, in time they get replaced. And you have to be able to take the moving parts of a gun apart for cleaning, there's no way to ensure a given pin doesn't get swapped to another gun.
And this once again comes back to at best only being useful in the cases where the gun was legally purchased, which is a very small part of gun crime.
Testing has demonstrated that microstamping remains readable on casings after thousands of rounds with a SEM.
Moreover, even if it wasn't, who cares? It would still be an improvement over what currently exists (unintentional microstamping) given a fair number of guns that are used in crimes have barely been fired.
Nor does it matter if someone switches the firing pin since criminals aren't likely to do that. They don't even file down serial numbers most of the time.
The fact that it isn't absolutely 100% perfect doesn't mean it isn't better.
This still comes down to the basic problem that the vast majority of crime guns were not obtained by legal means. Yes, criminals don't file down serial numbers because there's no reason to as the serial number isn't connected to them.
While the vast majority aren't obtained through legal means, a surprisingly large percentage can be connected to the individual who committed a crime with one.
According to the BJS, of those in prison in 2016 who had a firearm during the offense they were in for, 7.5% purchased it legally under their own name and 25.3% obtained it from family or friends. An older 2004 Survey of Inmates of State Correctional Facilities showed 12% obtaining them from retail and 41% from family/friends.
Criminals don't file down serial numbers not because there's no reason, but criminals don't think they'll be caught. Most simply don't think very far ahead.
Micro-stamping isn't perfect, but again, it is better. If it can lead to arrests in even a small percentage of the thousands of unsolved murders ever year, it would be a huge win with little downside.
You should reread Bruen there is not an "Objective Criteria" test for gun laws. There is a text history and tradition one which ownership licensing completely fails.
"If Israel can do it, the US absolutely can as well."
This is not just a matter of technical ability.
In practice, you cannot simply bypass current reading of the 2nd Amendment by SCOTUS, unless you have enough support to amend the Constitution again. Which, on this controversial topic, no one has.
I know, and my argument is that the Israeli model can be safely argued as falling within the current reading of the 2nd amendment, especially after NYSRPA v. Bruen
The reading of Buren allows control on concealed carry and gun ownership via objective criteria - which is what Israeli gun permitting rests on as well.
Yet, I have never seen a single organization fight for an Israeli style compromise for gun control in the US - almost all lawfare is either for abolitionism or unrestricted ownership.
OK, but this isn't a gun control story --- this is a story about a group of people that everybody, from Michael Bloomberg to the President of the NRA, agrees need to be armed.
There is a middle ground that can be found, but the extremes on both sides make it impossible to compromise.
I don't agree about this. I do not support the Everytown group (who I agree are skewing facts) but long before they came along, the pro gun lobby was absolutely intransigent on their own. Any reasonable proposal/discussion that had broad support could get derailed by second amendment absolutists. It's gotten considerably worse over the ~35 years I've been on the internet because online social communication rewards people for being assholes; so many online debates degenerate into the pro gun people just screeching that their opponents are hoplophobes or commies, and posting 'SHALL NOT ?BE INFRINGED' over and over.
I like guns and enjoy shooting, but I absolutely despise 'gun culture'and the firearms lobby. They have never been good-faith actors in my experience.
> [Nerds] sit in a room and dream up every way the device could fail and/or harm someone
Well, yeah. And as it happened they postulated the failure mode that was actually (allegedly) seen in practice. And they were right. So the "no one could have known" side of Sig's defense seems out the window here. They could have known, and they did, and relevant experts told them.
I really don't get your point here. You seem to be saying that risk analysis, in the abstract, as a whole field of practice, has no value because of the lack of certainty? But... managing uncertainty is the whole point. Do you really live your life like this? "I mean, people say fentanyl is dangerous but you never really know, right?"
"Well, we should be aware that brake failure is hypothetically possible if vanishingly unlikely, and it would be a huge deal if they did fail" is not the same as "Yeah our brakes have a known flaw that makes them exceptionally prone to failure lmao IDGAF ship it"
Clearly neither of those readings is a correct interpretation of the cited research.
Look folks, I know it offends your 2A inclinations, but this is a step in a legal action. One of the arguments made by any defendant in a case like this is "This was not a foreseeable risk". And that is directly and correctly refuted by the cited report. Period. And it's right that the media report on it.
Sig guns have a failure mode that is serious and impactful, and was aware of it when it sold the hardware.
So the important bit here is that the guns failed drop testing. And that's bad.
The rest of the article seems to misunderstand FMEA style "write down every conceivable bad scenario in the universe, how bad it is, and then what you have done to stop it", and then spins this as "look at all these horrible known issues they knew about". I hope a jury doesn't view it the same way, because it would be an epic bad for safety everywhere if engineers writing down a list of bad things to avoid and mitigate was forbidden by company lawyers.
Well, and then didn’t recall them - instead favoring the ‘voluntary upgrade’. And apparently even those ‘upgraded’ under that still have this other, even bigger issue.
In a nutshell, the defect that causes the guns to fire when holstered occurs when there is a small amount of pressure on the trigger. If the slide (top part of the gun) is wiggled / nudged, it will fire. Also, the gun can fire when dropped. Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
>Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
And just not having hot dog down a hallway tolerances at the slide to frame interface.
The trigger stuff lives in the bottom half of the gun and the bang stuff lives in the top half and only goes bang depending upon the relative position of the trigger stuff. So allowing the top half and the bottom half to move around a ton is generally unwise unless you make accommodations elsewhere in the design so that you still have proper relative position regardless of where in the hallway the hotdog is.
Also, they’ve had numerous issues with their triggers failing to reset correctly and/or otherwise misbehaving. That was the focus of the original ‘voluntary upgrade’.
That this giant mess of bad tolerances, sloppy change management, iffy manufacturing outsourcing, and a design which is sensitive to these issues it seems inevitable these kinds of random and hard to reproduce problems would occur. And the more they sold, the worse it would get.
Do that in something which literally can cause death and serious injury if it fails, in an environment where all your competitors designs don’t have these issues and hence users tend towards ‘round in the chamber’ and carrying them in all sorts of messy real world situations? Guaranteed disaster eventually.
Bad sig.
The brand was dead to me many years ago (extractor snapped in the middle of a course - seemed like bad metallurgy, or a bad design), but this is entirely another level of crazy.
I think Jared's video is good at conveying the mechanics of striker-fired guns, and he is completely correct that this issue exists to some degree in every striker-fired gun (and is not an issue in them). However, the parts in the P320 have so much variance that the wall is very "mushy" on some of these guns. I wouldn't be surprised if we find that these uncommanded discharges involve both movement in the trigger and movement of the slide.
It may be the case that variance is so wide that there are some P320's which are in that "depressed to the wall" state at rest, but that would require an x-ray or CAT scan of the offending guns, and I don't know if anyone other than Sig has one. There is also a safety on P320's that should be stopping this from happening, but again, it is a part with very wide variation, and on some guns it seems it doesn't work (Sig issued a recall over this already).
I agree with Jared that this problem is a lot trickier and weirder than people give it credit for. The sort of core of the issue is that everything about the gun was done cheaply and they flew a little too close to the sun, but I believe they have no idea what in particular they cheaped out on too much.
I understand your speculation on the amount of variance, but I haven't seen any data to support it.
Sig's "recall" was a drop-safety issue, where in certain orientations the weight of the trigger could generate enough momentum to allow an unintentional discharge.
There's plenty of data on the variances of P320 parts being much larger than specified by Sig, and it has been presented in a few court cases. Root causing this issue to tolerances hasn't been done, though.
It does. This whole "small amount of pressure on the trigger thing" stemmed from a video by "Wyoming Gun Project", in which he did the exact same thing to a P320.
Glock, unlike Sig, uses a trigger safety. It doesn't just require any trigger pressure, the lever safety needs to be pushed back. Is this bad? Of course. The Sig flaw is sig-nificantly worse.
I'm pretty sure you're not implying otherwise, but it's an outrageous design flaw regardless and selling these while being aware of the problem (to the military no less!) should carry devastating consequences for the manufacturers.
Nobody is talking about the gun firing when the trigger is pulled. The gun is firing when the trigger is explicitly not pulled. Even if you're talking about the video the parent comment linked, the very first few seconds of the video show the gun discharging without a finger anywhere near the trigger. That's a deadly design flaw that in any other industry should have resulted in a full recall. Here, it was known and covered up while innocent people who made no operational error were maimed. To suggest otherwise is denying objective reality.
I think one of the best demonstrations of this, with detail on the amount of travel required for most striker-fired handguns is this video [0]. Lots of detail and relatively methodical.
So a classic sig double action or 1911 wouldn't be effected? He video says striker fired specifically. Cocked and locked I'm not sure how you would make this happen.
Hammer-fired guns have a similar issue if you drop them directly on the hammer (or on parts that can move the hammer) when the hammer is cocked. When the hammer is not cocked, there's no available energy in the firing mechanism to discharge the gun. Striker fired guns are effectively in the cocked state at rest, though. In a "cocked and locked" state, you would need the drop to disengage or overcome the safety, not just the normal trigger mechanism.
Not affected in the same way. The original M1911 design has a floating firing pin held back only by spring tension, so in theory it might be possible to get it to discharge without pressing the trigger by dropping it straight onto the muzzle from a sufficient height. This is so unlikely in practice that it's not a real concern. Some newer variants also incorporate an extra internal safety that blocks the firing pin from moving.
You have to partially pull the trigger to release the safety lever on the stiker. Once you do that, all bets are off, you have manually overridden one of the main designed safety features.
It is like saying, if you tape the trigger safety down on the Glock and drop it can go off, therefore it is a design defect.
I believe you may be confusing the type of safeties that block even intentional firings with safeties that try to block unintended firings (such as from drops or other mechanical stress). Pistols have multiple levels of safeties involved.
A trigger safety is meant to ensure that the trigger must be intentionally pulled (as opposed to moving during an impact) for the firing pin to be able to release and hit cartridge primer.
The 1911 famously has a grip safety, which needs to be depressed for the trigger to move. This is to try to ensure someone has to be gripping it with intent to fire, for it to be able to do so. While much safer than other pistols at the time, 100+ years later the design is relatively flawed, and isn’t truly drop safe, as the firing pin can still move.
The purpose of a safety on the trigger is to prevent the trigger from moving due to inertia if it is dropped. There are many different safety mechanisms on guns, this is just one, for one specific case.
Sig has good engineering videos where they walk through many of the mechanisms on the M17/18/320.
Also, does not help that the US Army does NOT want this FMECA document released. From the article that is cited the US Army's project manager & legal counsel gave this response to help Sig justify keeping the document sealed:
> The Army position would be to oppose the distribution to the public of the
> FMECA document as it potentially reveals critical information about the
> handgun (design, reliability, performance, etc.).
Wow that’s asinine. Like, russian-tier levels of lying straight to your face.
I should really know to expect less, but they yet again managed to slide under even my low expectations of sense.
Pistols are the least important weapon in a war. Their capabilities are essential identical, and you can replace every sig with a Glock and the only thing that’ll change is whose pockets the money fills.
The idea of an enemy trying to plan a battle based on the flaws of a particular pistol is exceedingly silly. Even Blackadder has gags more grounded in reality.
Army is going to try to limit distribution of any internal document, a version of deny-all security. There could be more general insights to be obtained by enemies, not specifics, and this information can add to other intel to build a theory. For example, if the pistol spec said "oh we only need 5 rounds", then that could be evidence towards Army not taking close quarters combat seriously. It would not be used to build a "just dodge 5 times then charge" doctrine.
>Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
No. They are mitigated by a firing pin block that must be lifted by the full travel of the trigger, so that the block is lifted out of the way, for the firing pin to access the primer.
You forgot to mention that the gun also needs to have a bullet chambered. Not exactly how I would carry a holstered weapon, but hey, I’m 100% certain people do exactly that. Especially in a military situation so I’m not judging.
"There has to be a round in the chamber for a round to be fired" seems sort of tautological if I'm being honest.
Very, very few serious people would argue that anyone carrying a firearm should carry it without a round in the chamber. Yes, "Israeli carry" is a thing, but is almost entirely endorsed simply as a training carry-over from a time when people carried different weapons of widely varying mechanical safety features in a very unique high-threat environment.
If you're carrying a firearm professionally, or in the US "recreationally" for personal protection, carrying without a round in the chamber will be seen by most people as a pretty stupid decision.
As a Sig 320 owner, and someone that knows at least 3 other sig 320 owners, I disagree. None of us ever carry our weapon chambered. I probably know 10+ guys that own guns, including a few police officers, and I'm going to ask the officers about this because honestly, I would be surprised if they even carried their weapons chambered.
Certainly not the first time something like this happened. During Vietnam, the US Army sent soldiers into combat with the M16 knowing that it had major issues that often caused it to jam. We’ll never know exactly people were killed by such a bad decision, but it quickly became infamous early in the war.[0]
There was nothing wrong with the M16/AR-15; the Marines had been issued the weapon in Vietnam as well (with different ammo than the army received) and it worked fine.
The issue was that the Army Bureau of Ordinance insisted on making 5.56mm ammunition with a propellant composition different from the one that Stoner had specified when designing the weapon, one that was entirely unsuitable and led to jamming.
Yes but it was worse due to design problems with the gun as well, seeing as how they did change it - I.e. adding chrome plating to the chamber and barrel which reduced fouling, and actually including a proper cleaning kit.
The chrome lining was done to significantly increase the service life of the barrel and to reduce corrosion in some environments. Prior to the M16, chrome lining was only used on machine guns due to the volume of rounds that went through them.
Far more rounds were put through the M16 by soldiers than prior weapons like the M14. Despite the chrome lining, M16 barrels still wear out over time and have to be replaced.
"in some environments" being the Vietnam war the US was involved in, in reaction to casualty reports where a large number of men were killed with their rifles broken down for repair likely due to mid battle stoppages.
And the same applies to number of rounds: the entire point of a 5.56mm cartridge was to give soldiers more ammo so they could sustain volume of fire in the field: it was a design goal.
If design changes fixed a serious flaw with a weapon, then it was a flawed design.
There was nothing wrong with the M16, it worked very well for a number of years. Then the US Army unilaterally modified the ammunition to save money in such a way as to make it no longer within specification for the weapon. Predictably, the use of out-of-spec ammunition caused issues.
The Army never changed the ammunition back. Instead, the weapon was modified (M16A1) to be compatible with the formerly out-of-spec ammunition and the issues went away.
You can't blame the M16 for the US Army using ammunition that wasn't fit for purpose.
A dishonourable mention for the original A1 version of the British SA80, which required high levels of lubrication to operate properly, and as a result often jammed in sandy environments... like Kuwait and Iraq [1].
I seem to recall the A0 also used to yeet the magazine when you ran with it across your chest on the sling, because the mag release button had no guard (but that might be me misremembering it. )
Are you referring to the M9/92? I don't own one but I've heard it's one of those guns that everyone who was issued one hates it, and everyone who bought one on the civilian market loves it - the implication being they just don't shoot it enough to run into any issues.
This article makes me wonder about comparative analysis against other models and brands. It is good Sig Sauer produced a failure mode analysis. Where are the competitive analysis documents?
It also makes me wonder if the reason it can't fix some of these issues is because it is working around patent issues.
It appears based on some other court documents that Sig with the P320 intentionally excluded a trigger tab safety based on marketing decisions to be competitive, which every other striker-fired handgun has included. That along with some other issues appears to be the basis for where the P320 design went wrong.
> This article makes me wonder about comparative analysis against other models and brands. It is good Sig Sauer produced a failure mode analysis. Where are the competitive analysis documents?
Presumably buried in the woods along with whatever shenanigans went down to award XM17 to Sig over Glock without going through the full predescribed testing in the first place
The reason they can’t fix these issues is someone in leadership likely literally has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and is quite literally incapable of acknowledging a mistake or problem. To the point they’ll inevitably torpedo the company rather than take any ownership or responsibility.
If the Board is smart, they’ll fire the person before it gets to that point - but if they were smart, they probably wouldn’t have hired the type of
person to get them into this mess in the first place.
What is the personality disorder that makes someone with no medical training believe they can diagnose "likely" mental health disorders in Generic Executive in a company they have no direct relationship with?
What is the personality disorder where someone refuses to consider the possibility of something happening despite a public and long term pattern of repeated behavior which matches that possibility occurring, unless some otherwise impossible bit of evidence from an expert who has a duty to never talk to them about it weighs in?
That's not really an Occam's Razor conclusion. I would say the reason is that multiple lawsuits were already filed, and to admit the gun was defective essentially means you lose all the suits overnight. At the time, they chose to ride it out because they didn't know how many of these guns were actually defective.
My guess is it was a perfect storm where the defect rate was low enough to escape their quality control but high enough (or perhaps delayed long enough, meaning it takes years for the defect to appear) to lead to a clear signal after the horse got out of the barn. Enough suits were filed that they perhaps risk bankruptcy if they lose all of them.
That's just my speculation, and seems to be more plausible than some side effect from mental illness.
That was less than a year ago, and well after these issues have been escalating for years.
The co-ordinated gaslighting, projection, denial, etc. are also a clear pattern going back years as well.
The employees clearly being aware there are issues and being afraid to speak up due to internal retaliation, the lawsuits against entities merely trying to protect themselves from preventing people from carrying P320’s into their facilities until this gets figured out, etc. as well.
No one goes to this amount of effort to deny they have a problem (and control others to prevent them from acknowledging there is a problem) without an impetus like that.
I’m not saying the underlying engineering problem is a result of a mental health problem with someone in leadership. Though it likely doesn’t help!
I’m saying the market problem SIG is having (and the serious consequences of it) are due to the mishandled response to a real issue in engineering/manufacturing in a way which stinks clearly to me of NPD.
It’s the doubling down, attacking anyone who notices a real issue, gaslighting everyone, etc.
Hell, when even Brandon Herrera is telling them to fuck off due to the gaslighting?
It’s epic in this case. And NPD folks have a nasty habit of ‘taking down the ship’ as they escalate. It’s damn near the defining consequence that makes it a personality disorder.
Which SIG is definitely heading in that direction.
I agree that the tone was really awful and hostile. I'd give the company a 50% or less chance of recovering from this.
A few months ago I read a story about a woman who worked at sig and was sexually harassed by her boss and was demoted and fired. I can't remember if she was involved (as a witness) in an injury lawsuit about the P320 or what, but reading her story made me remove any possible sympathy I could have for her. Makes me sad I bought my P365 even though it's a great weapon.
> someone in leadership likely literally has Narcissistic Personality Disorder
What a wild, unjustified claim. Not every arrogant fool has NPD. If you want to throw that claim around you best be ready to cite the clinical definition.
The clinical definition where someone is unable to recognize any fault or problem in their behavior to the point of severe pathology, and delusion, including attacking or manipulating others?
Have you seen the press releases and lawsuits? It’s quite literally crazy what they’re doing.
And executives set the culture of a company, and someone with the described personality characteristics are particularly prone to enforce that type of behavior on an entire companies culture.
I’ve seen it play out quite clearly before in person.
Why work so hard to continue to avoid the actual issue and clearly present behaviors and facts?
Or do you think such persistent and blatant pathological behavior just happens naturally from otherwise well adjusted executives acting in good faith?
And clearly since you've seen it play out that way, there are no other possible situations that could result in similar behavior. The possibility that a public admission of fault could play a role in ongoing or future lawsuits definitely doesn't have anything to do with it. Nope, only one conceivable motivation for hiding the truth, which is conveniently located in a single guy, who is definitely not just a run-of-the-mill arrogant fool.
I take it you haven’t actually read the linked posts from SIG? Read them and then tell me I’m wrong.
No lawyer or PR person in their right mind would EVER okay that type of response. And with the facts as we know them coming out, those responses were deeply pathological.
You know, I actually hadn't, but they were nothing I didn't expect. Of course they were lying. Lots of people without NPD lie. They were in a hole, and they thought digging was their best way out. Playing on fears of gun-grabbing is a plausible if clumsy angle to take. If their design had been less borked, they might even have gotten away with it. That's why lots of unethical but otherwise grounded PR types have historically okay'd this kind of thing.
You can debate whether they're still "in their right mind" by your preferred definition, but it's increasingly preposterous to say their behavior is evidence of an executive with NPD. This is just not that special, dude. People are just like this.
Uh huh, sure. Definitely nothing particularly spectacular here at all.
How many gun companies have had this level of scandal again? The only one I can think of is Taurus in the 80’s.
Doesn’t sound normal at all, actually.
What really amuses me about these kinds of conversations is how invested people are in insisting that when it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is at the pond with the ducks, and looks like a duck - it totally isn’t a duck, because… I don’t know. They don’t like ducks? Or ducks are boring?
Oh, it's pretty spectacular. Just not evidence for NPD. That was your thesis, right, this very specific clinical diagnosis? Do you still remember that? You desperately want to believe this bird you found at the lake is a rare, special species of duck, but it's just a mallard.
That's a deadly twist to "move fast and break things" motto.
Seriously, Sig Sauer. You are making weapons, not disposable pens, and the world leading disposable pen company literally uses "standards x 1.5" as their baseline.
They make pens, lighters and razor blades, at least.
For their lighters, they use engineering resins instead of simple plastics. They have their internal standards stricter than EU ones for temperature and drop resistance.
They make their own inks for their pens according to their own standards instead of getting from someone. Their razor blades last at least 25% longer than their competitors, and they sell for much cheaper.
They are a company of contradictions. Their items are disposable, yet put many "higher tier" items to shame by being better, longer lasting and cheaper at the same time.
They are fundamentally an engineering and manufacturing company. It’s the same ethos as some Japanese manufacturers who put the effort to produce reliable, accurate tools for cheap and where the marketing department haven’t taken over. They really ought to be better understood.
There's another article that is cited where Sig with someone else was apparently developing the fixes to resolve these issues years before the gun was actually tested with the US Army, but didn't deploy the fixes until they were pressured:
Those fixes apparently resolved the drop safety issues. The uncommanded discharges that have been in the news as of late—where holstered P320s seemingly discharge on their own—is an entirely separate issue. Sig denies that there's a problem, blaming holster designs, debris in holsters, and people lying to cover up their own carelessness.
One thing this article fails to mention about the Air Force incident is that the Air Force has made an arrest for "making a false official statement, obstruction of justice and involuntary manslaughter."
Sig claims the issue was resolved. Keep in mind that Sig never admitted to the issue. They only issued a voluntary upgrade and never issued a safety recall.
Yes, Sig should have issued a recall instead of doing a "voluntary upgrade."
Nevertheless, is anyone actually claiming that the upgraded P320 is not drop safe? The issue people are talking about these days is holstered P320s apparently discharging uncommanded, apart from any drops.
I see these as potentially the same thing depending on the details. There are some videos that show the gun was in a holster and not being messed with, etc. It also seems it could be from something hitting the holster (most reports include this). Whether the impact is from being dropped or being struck in the holster (or even vibrations as the one report mentions) is essentially the same - kinetic energy transfer to the gun. The question now is are some of the reports of discharging in the holster due to lies, holster design, debris, etc. I haven't found any official drop testing with the new FCU that found an issue (unofficially there are some, but who knows if the person really has the new FCU in those posts).
They are not the same issue. The drop safety issue was when the pistol was dropped at a particular angle (that wasn't part of standard tests—how it was missed!), the trigger was massive enough and the trigger pull was light enough that inertia would lead to the trigger moving to the rear, causing the firearm to discharge. It was a very specific failure nothing like any of the alleged uncommanded discharges.
The trigger movement wasn't enough to fully depress from my understanding. The problem is, even a slight depression of the trigger disengages the striker safeties. Most of the uncommanded discharges dod alleged that the gun or holder were struck. There are multiple standards for drop tests requiring various angles and heights.
While I agree with the title of the article, some of the contents seem a little over the top in the way they present them. We would need to see the document to know how bad it really is. Many of the failure modes could be user dependent for lack of training (ie finger in trigger guard when holstering). They also don't say which failure modes were fixed and what remained. That said, all you need is one valid failure mode to be dangerous.
"Sig Sauer also stated that the manual safeties on M17 and M18 pistols would resolve some of the issues,"
This would only be the training dependent ones. Mechanically, the safety only blocks the trigger and does nothing to block the striker or sear.
> They also don't say which failure modes were fixed and what remained.
The article links a document[0] which lists them. My reading of this is that it's not listing issues that were found in the P320, but issues that can occur in handguns in general. One of the items is "unsafe hammer decock", which has never been possible with the P320 because it does not have a hammer. It is listed as eliminated.
The remaining medium risks are:
- The user might accidentally pull the trigger by resting their finger on it when they do not intend to fire the gun
- Mishandling the gun might cause a foreign object to pull the trigger
- A drop or vibration might cause the gun to fire
- The user might accidentally pull the trigger a second time due to motion during recoil
- The user may accidentally pull the trigger while clearing a jam
- A broken firing pin could lodge in the firing position, causing the gun to fire when the slide closes
- The user might accidentally pull the trigger during holstering or unholstering
- The sear might fail to retain the striker, causing an uncommanded discharge when chambering a round, or a second uncommanded shot after an intentional shot
- Defective ammunition could rupture and injure the shooter or bystanders
- Recoil can lead to repetitive motion injuries
- Incorrect disassembly and reassembly can lead to a firearm which does not function correctly
Two of these (drop/vibration, failure to retain striker) describe the current uncommanded discharge problem. Five of the issues are different ways someone with insufficient training might mishandle a gun and pull the trigger unintentionally.
You are commenting on a post written by "Everytown for Gun Safety" one of the largest gun control groups in the country, so this is definitely part of a campaign by the “anti-gun mob”.
In my circles, what was astounding was the right wing gun club were doubly offended by this attempted blame. Either because they were offended for being called anti-gun leftists for having concern over the p320 or because Sig seemed to be ducking responsibility with some Trumpian style PR. Maybe both. I recall seeing comments like “it’s not the left, they don’t even know what a f**n sear is”
I've only been around "gun culture" for 5-6 years or so, but not a single person I know in the fairly conservative area of my fairly conservative state thinks talking shit about a gun company means you're anti-gun - especially Sig which everyone hates now.
Nobody takes the NRA seriously or cares anything about what they do, either, so maybe I just happen to be in a sane pocket of the culture but other than the obvious paid shills like GBRS who are terrible human beings anyway, even on YouTube and other sources everyone has been talking shit on Sig for a year or longer.
> maybe I just happen to be in a sane pocket of the culture
Same in my circle too. NRA is perceived as an embezzling joke that spends more on yachts than preserving the right to keep and bear arms, and Sig is an untrustworthy joke that is allergic to taking accountability.
Eh, this is someone in SIG leadership using every scapegoat and excuse they can to avoid having to acknowledge or take responsibility for their screwup, instead compounding it to the point where it will seriously hurt the company - maybe even torpedo them.
The things you’re talking about give them some cover/mechanisms, but most other manufacturers are looking on in horror at this, not copying them.
Yeah American gun culture is now substantially LARPers kitting up like they're going to the front lines.
Ironically they call people who are into sportsmanship "fudders" and any gun that doesn't have a picatinny rail and a 20-round clip a "fudd gun." The reference is to "Elmer Fudd."
Being a Fudd isn't about being into sportsmanship. It's about opposing the civilian ownership of firearms besides bolt action rifles and non-semiautomatic shotguns.
I think the idea that if you don't know the basic names of something your opinion on it is suspect is a fair criticism. Especially with the very odd reference to a 20-round magazine. There is no state in the country where a 20-round AR magazine is legal and the standard-capacity 30-round magazine is not. Virginia has a 20-round maximum but only on handguns.
It should be acknowledged that the commenter is an avid NPR listener (nothing wrong with that) who doesn't have any skin in the game (something wrong with that, at least per his commentary).
I wonder if a manual safety here would've helped. There is this idea in the gun world that a gun has multiple safeties, like a trigger safety, striker safety etc, disassembly safety, disconnector safety, ...
And the way they are presented is in a way that they stack. But they don't.
Let's say the striker safety has failed and you drop the gun. It goes off. Even if you have a trigger safety. Or a disconnector safety.
Not in this case. There are many different kinds of safeties, and they aren't magic off switches.
Consider a computer program (with a UI mated to underlying mechanics) that talks to a database.
In this case, just because the frontend (the trigger) has a "safety" on it such that it guards against initiating a chain of events that results in something being written to the database, the backend generally remains capable of it anyway.
So, if you have some other logic or condition that can start that API call (let's assume the program fires off a bunch of random inputs to various APIs if you physically drop the computer it's running on, and then you drop it), the DB write may still happen even though it was never triggered from the frontend.
Now, you can do various things to guard against that known behavior- from ensuring the activity chain started on the frontend to physically disconnecting the computer from the database until you're ready to write- but at the end of the day the machine has to be capable of performing the write immediately when commanded, and the sacrifices you're going to make to enable that will be controlled by your engineering and testing.
In this case, the trigger (and other associated safeties) are the "frontend", the mechanical workings are the "backend", and "the gun fires" is "a DB operation".
Are there a number of police shootings where the officer claims his gun "went off"?
One of the first rules of gun safety is never point the weapon at something you aren't intending to shoot. So by the time they are pointing their guns at a suspect, actually firing probably happens a lot? Or are cops actually trained to hold a person at gunpoint (I don't believe the TV dramas and movies where this happens constantly are realistic in this regard).
If so, it seems very risky, considering potential manufacturing or design defects such as discovered with the Sig.
American cops get surprisingly little training and all the public-recorded videos show cops pulling out their guns to to escalate and intimidate, even in the seemingly innocuous situation like a traffic stop.
I wouldn't believe American cops are trained with "safety first" rule in mind. The evidence doesn't seem to support it.
Pretty sure people have been shouting about this for years. There have been a half dozen accidental discharges by police officers with most reports of no contact with the trigger.
There’s a trigger update available to fix the problem that sig claims doesn’t exist. There’s have been multiple injuries and a few deaths.
This report coupled with the community and law enforcement reports stack up to some pretty damning evidence of what they knew and when they knew it.
Same, fortunately my local shooting range has a good selection of firearms to try. I tried the P320 and P365. I had been considering the P365, but it was so snappy I reasoned the otherwise completely boring P320 would be a better fit for my needs. However, it was close enough to another firearm I own that I decided to cool-off and see if I still wanted it in a month... then this all broke.
My girlfriend has a P365X. I wouldn't touch a P320 with a ten foot pole, but the 365 and its variants have proven pretty reliable for many people. It is definitely snappy though, but most "subcompacts" are, because physics.
There has been no repeatable method discovered to make the p320 discharge without a trigger pull. The airforce arrested and charged someone with homicide in the most recent incident. Lacking evidence and repeatability all these incidents represent subjectively reported anecdotes.
It reminds me of the spate of reports of people dying while cleaning a gun. If you know anything about firearms you know this is not possible. People I know in law enforcement said it was a way of not saying someone committed suicide.
> If someone can just show us how to replicate [these uncommanded discharges] we will absolutely look at this from all aspects to make sure there isn’t any truth to this. In a company of our size, would anyone ever believe that there was a real issue going on, and we wouldn’t address it?”
This is exactly how I sound when I get a bug that is hard to repro. Just like these guns, there's evidence that the bug happened, but it's really hard to figure out how. Still a bug. People are still dead.
Uncommanded discharges are very well reproduced at this point.
At the very least that I'm aware of, there was initial work by Youtuber "3 P320s In A Trenchcoat" showing a series of ways to get the striker to drop w/o touching the trigger. More recently, a Youtuber with Wyoming in their channel name showed that they could reproduce them with just the slightest trigger movement in conjunction with wiggling the slide.
This last one is the most damning IMO. You can dismiss it because there's a screw in the trigger but he shows in a separate video that it's not actually screwed into the frame or anything - it's just there to keep the < 0.5mm of slack out of the trigger. Once that's accomplished, all you have to do is wiggle the slide around for a round to get discharged. He does it on the first attempt - even he didn't expect it to be that easy.
It's very easy to see how a police officer jostling around with a suspect or getting in and out of their car can cause the trigger and the slide to move at the right time to cause this issue.
That's not what that experiment is showing. If you move the trigger by 1mm and jostle the slide, nothing will happen. You have to take the trigger _to the wall_, and then 0.5mm further, and then wiggle the slide.
> vice president of commercial sales, said, “If someone can just show us how to replicate [these uncommanded discharges] we will absolutely look at this from all aspects to make sure there isn’t any truth to this.
Am I reading it correctly: if you provide us with a detailed bug report we will make sure to properly justify why we think it is not a bug and "works as intended"? :)
I bought a gun three years ago. The P320 would have been my favorite, but so many police officers shot their calves and feet. I didn't really wanted that.
I don't believe people on Sauer's payroll for a second. They earn their money shilling these faulty guns.
Biggest issue here is the lack of clarity. I truly don't know if there is an issue with the pistol and as such I simply wont buy a Sig. The risk just isn't worth it. This is devastating for the Sig brand whether there is an issue or not. Tough spot to be in for a brand.
Note that not only has Sig Sauer lied about this and attempted to gaslight people[1], they have also sued organizations to force them to continue using the pistol after they chose to discontinue use due to the dangers[2]
I don't know much about guns so maybe can help me understand. How is it possible that a holstered gun has pressure in the trigger in the first place? And also, shouldn't the safety always be on?
Many modern handguns do not have a manually activated safety. The Sig M17/M18 does, but the safety only blocks the trigger from moving rearward far enough to fire.
It may not block the trigger from moving enough to disengage an internal, automatic safety that prevents the firing pin from traveling all the way forward if it is released due to a malfunction. It is also possible that the firing pin block safety does not always work even if the trigger is fully forward.
consumer versions of this pistol do not have a manual safety
they have internal safety mechanisms to prevent discharge, and these are important if you carry with a round chambered - in a striker-fired pistol, the firing pin is under tension and is only being restrained by the trigger and internal safeties
this is why I do not carry with a round chambered, if you appendix carry and something goes wrong, you will be missing an important appendage
This is why I carry a gun I trust. I keep one chambered at all times, pointing at my junk. I am not concerned about my junk. I am much more concerned about not being able to get a shot off in time if I ever need to use it.
For anyone wanting a quick breakdown of the current situation: the Sig Sauer P320 is a striker-fired handgun, which means the firing pin is spring loaded and retained by a sear. Other handguns are hammer-fired, where the trigger (or slide actuation) cocks the hammer. Other popular striker-fired guns include the Glock and Smith and Wesson M&P series. Frequently, striker-fired pistols come without safeties, but optionally add them.
The P320 was popular as it was designed as a modular system, allowing a single FCU (firing control unit, basically a trigger and striker assembly) to be independent and swappable with other parts of the handgun: grip, slide, barrel, etc. This allows for a single platform to serve multiple needs: concealed carry, compact, full-size, or even competition models, as well as be transferrable across calibers. The magazine design also allowed for more rounds to be carried in compact configurations.
The P320 was selected by the US Army [0] as the official replacement for the Beretta M9 as a service-issued sidearm, officially designated the M17 or M18 (in 9mm).
In 2020 SIG SAUER initiated a "voluntary upgrade program" [1] that swapped various components of the trigger to prevent unintended discharge (UD) events that could occur when the pistol dropped in certain orientations. These changes became standard for the M17 and all P320 manufactured after.
Recently, there have been very high-profile cases and investigations around UD events, the most recent being by an event in the Air Force that led to the death of an airman. In that case the Air Force put a suspension on the firearm during the investigation but eventually arrested the airman responsible, as they determined he had lied about the events [2].
Regardless of the specific failure modes of the weapon, there is a stigma around it, resulting in various law enforcement agencies switching from it or ranges banning the firearm. This has been popularized by incidents caught on video and somewhat viral videos of testing the firearm in a variety of scenarios.
All in all, the P320 is one of the most mass-produced firearms in the world, and I would not be surprised to see Sig Sauer continue to fight in the court of public opinion to defend the reputation of the firearm, in what I would deem a losing strategy.
An important point to recognize is that gun manufacturers have almost no product liability exposure due to laws pushed by the NRA.
Of course the NRA pitched these laws to their members as protecting against gun violence victims suing the manufacturer, but they also slipped in that gun manufacturers have no legal responsibility to provide guns to buyers that do not fire unless the trigger is pulled.
If you're referring to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act[0] passed in 2005, that's not true. It only bars lawsuits against gun manufacturers and dealers for criminal misuse of their products, not for hazardous defects.
Remington settled a class action lawsuit[1] concerning rifles that could fire without a trigger pull filed after the passage of that law.
You're probably referencing a New Hampshire law that prevents product liability lawsuits against gun manufacturers for not including manual safeties. That law would not prevent product liability lawsuits in cases where guns discharge without the trigger being actuated.
> they also slipped in that gun manufacturers have no legal responsibility to provide guns to buyers that do not fire unless the trigger is pulled.
Where does this idea come from? If this is the case, the document being discussed in the OP would not even exist, because there would be no need to document situations causing unintentional discharge.
It seems to be acquired through social osmosis, i.e. hearing people talk about it and then repeating their assertions as if it were a fact - usually with subtle changes colored by the speakers own world view - until some version of "truth" permeates society. I guess you could consider it like a game of telephone at a societal level. The Citizens United case is another great example where what people think it held is very different from what it actually held. It's also frustrating given the fact that we live in a time where the barrier to verify these claims is incredibly low or even non-existent because of the internet.
Slightly more cynical take - it comes from gun-control advocates who want to repeal all of the firearms provisions in the PLCA lying about what it does to generate more public support for its repeal.
People who just dislike guns (or dislike the people who like guns) then repeat it forever, even after proven wrong.
I am sure that those people exist, by how many are they and what kind of power do they have? To me it seems that they are convenient boogeymen every time someone suggests a sensible reform that would make gun circulation less of a problem (like restrictions for criminals and mentally unstable people or background checks). I don’t doubt your sincerity, but this is just too simple a point of view for such a complex and nuanced situation.
Pretty much everything out of Giffords is a complete lie[0], for some context. I'm sure there are gun control advocacy groups not as blatant as they are but that's the one I'm most familiar with, in part because they're the most egregious. They command decent power in Washington still.
I think your examples make a good point though. There are absolutely times and places where someone's right to gun ownership can and should be suspended or even outright denied - the same as we do with freedom of speech, voting, or any other right. But it's already illegal in every state for recently released felon to own a gun - only 12 states have some sort of automatic renewal of gun rights and most of them are 10 years after release for non-violent offenses only.
It depends on your definition of "mentally unstable" but there are several mental health questions on the form you have to fill out for the ATF if you buy a firearm. Paradoxically in the 50s-70s there was a huge push to deinstitutionalize mental health treatment, close the vast majority of mental asylums, and make it much harder to involuntarily commit someone, but that's also the primary mechanism by which you prevent someone from acquiring a firearm on mental health grounds.
It's been a while since I've done a deep dive on background check requirements as they tend to vary by type of firearm but you cannot buy any firearm from a dealer without a background check. Honestly I think this is the one gun control advocates could make the most ground on, and the one that people can most reasonably disagree on. Quick AI math tells me that 32 states allow the purchase of a rifle from a private individual without a background check, which covers about 48% of the US population.
[0] https://x.com/GIFFORDS_org/status/1953570096443510896 claims nearly 1,000 people die from gun violence in Colorado in a year when the average is less than 300 and it's never been more than the low 400's - in fact numbers have only drastically increased as Colorado has passed more and more restrictive gun laws
Anti-gunners first started practicing lawfare against companies involved in the gun industry by suing them for crimes committed using products the companies were involved with, even though this is a ridiculous idea never applied to any other type of product. They do it because, even when the lawsuits are thrown out eventually, they are still very expensive to defend and most companies in the industry don't have particularly deep pockets.
Gun-rights advocates got laws passed in a number of jurisdictions clarifying that gun manufacturers are only liable for genuine flaws in their products. This has largely squelched these types of nuisance lawsuits.
Anti-gun activists don't like that, so they frequently spread false information that such laws prevent manufacturers from being liable for genuine flaws in their products. Despite such false claims, no law ever passed or proposed actually does this, and no law in this area has ever been repealed due to actually blocking liability for genuine flaws.
Keep in mind, too, that the US Army does NOT want this FMECA document released. From the article that is cited the US Army's project manager & legal counsel gave this response to help Sig justify keeping the document sealed:
> The Army position would be to oppose the distribution to the public of the > FMECA document as it potentially reveals critical information about the > handgun (design, reliability, performance, etc.).
As others have said, this is simply false. The shield is against liability for misuse--or do you think people should be able to sue Ford for making a car a drunk can drive?
Furthermore, look at what caused it: the gun grabbers were planning to bury the gun makers in a flood of lawsuits that would overwhelm them regardless of whether they were actually wrong.
They can freeze funds and cancel future contracts, which should be enough pressure. What's wild to me is the military version was not even remotely safer.
100% the families of those affected by Sigs goof ups should sue.
The NRA has been insidious since its coup back in the day and then its subsequent commandeering by the right wing as a propaganda tool: at one point, there was a popular pistol type (I don’t recall the make/model) that was really good at accidentally discharging and the NRA helped not only to shield the manufacturer from liability, but also to keep the guns in circulation because there was a specific group of people (cough black cough) who disproportionately favored this gun due to iirc low price point. It was pretty obviously a case of “well hey, if these guns are accidentally firing and killing _black folk_ then it’s not really an issue”
In this case, the historic reputation for quality is entirely disconnected from the company. SIG USA shares a brand with the German and Swiss companies with the same name, but it is not the same company that made the P226
All 3 entities - the German, Swiss, and US entities are owned by a German holding company L&O Holdings, but yes, the basis of the 226 was designed by the original Swiss entity.
“Enshitification” refers to pivoting from selling a product to selling the audience that bought the product. For instance, Windows putting ads in the start menu.
As awful as this Sig Sauer fiasco is, it doesn’t seem to be a result of a pivot to indirect monetization.
This is not what enshittification means. Facebook enshittified itself without ever having sold a product to its users. They were selling their users' personal data before they ever became enshittified.
Enshittification is about obtaining, then abusing platform semi-monopoly power to extract more money from your users and your customers by making your product worse.
> Enshittification is about obtaining, then abusing platform semi-monopoly power to extract more money from your users and your customers by making your product worse.
Yeah, this is how I meant it.
In the case of Sig, it was probably cost-cutting, product management by committee, corner-cutting due to tight business reqs, or some combo of the above.
Few people would be surprised if a car drove forward when on, in gear, and the gas pedal is depressed.
When a specific make/model has a nasty habit of driving through the sides of garages when off and no one is touching them, and eventually runs someone over and kills them? People get concerned.
Especially when the manufacturer knew this could (and was!) happening and insisted on gaslighting everyone about it for years.
That cars can be used to run people over (and sometimes are even designed to do so effectively!) doesn’t change that. Especially since most miles driven never run anyone over at all.
I find the car = gun analogy so tired. A car's purpose is to transport, and sometimes it accidentally kills. A gun's purpose is to kill. People always say "it's a tool"... yeah, to kill. Anytime you have a device like that, unexpected killings can happen. People shoot themselves and other people accidentally all the time; not because it was not "used as intended", but because it's a killing device.
I find this argument tired and poorly thought out. As a hunter there are many times kill is my goal. I also use my guns for target practice where kill is not the goal. Just because a gun's purpose is to kill does not mean it has to kill anything, or that car drivers should get off for their killing. A death is a death, it needs to be intentional killing only with either a gun or a car.
Most gun owners are very aware of how deadly their tool is, and are careful with it. Most car owners do not put anywhere near the safety thought into how they drive (it is rare to see someone maintain a 3 second following distance even though that along could save a lot of lives)
The P320 is a service pistol used by various US military branches, police forces and other people with an obvious need to carry a gun. The design is unsafe compared to other designs. People who's job requires carrying a gun are made less safe by this pistol. How would "guns are made to kill people, so who cares" justify an unsafe design?
Devices are supposed to work as intended, implied is WHEN intended. If you have a circular saw that randomly cuts when not asked, is a mature response "oh no our cutty thing cuts" ?
That is why your post was flagged. A snarky, snide response like your detracts from meaningful discussion.
> Devices are supposed to work as intended, implied is WHEN intended. If you have a circular saw that randomly cuts when not asked, is a mature response "oh no our cutty thing cuts" ?
Yes, always assume that you will get cut and treat it as such.
> That is why your post was flagged.
I don't care. I knew it was gonna get downvoted to hell. I'm not trolling, I'm trying to point out that people shouldn't be surprised when something like this happens. That's why you're "never supposed to point a gun at something you don't want to shoot", right? The logic there is that it could always go off unintentionally. In this case, it goes off unintentionally a little more often.
> That's why you're "never supposed to point a gun at something you don't want to shoot", right? The logic there is that it could always go off unintentionally.
I'm going to take you at your word that you're not trolling and treat this as a legitimate good faith question/argument.
The logic of that is emphatically not that guns randomly go off on their own so you do that for safety. They're not supposed to (obviously), and if you're looking at modern firearms it really only happens due to damage or massive design flaws (which would cover the 320).
The logic is that it's a Swiss cheese threat model that is designed to reduce the odds of a negligent discharge and reduce the damage should one happen (which in 99.99999% of cases is someone pulling the trigger unintentionally).
1. Treat all guns as though they are loaded - if you're ever handling a gun, the first thing you're supposed to do is visually and physically check the chamber and the magazine well that there is no magazine and an empty chamber.
2. Don't point the firearm at anything you don't want to destroy - even immediately after checking a firearm if you flag someone with it a lot of gun stores will kick you out. Even with no magazine and the slide locked back it's incredibly poor form to point it anywhere close to another person.
3. Be sure of your target and what's behind it - pretty self-explanatory and a borderline repeat of #2. In a self-defense type of scenario this also means "don't shoot at unidentified things."
4. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot - the only purpose of the trigger is to send a round downrange so there's zero reason to be messing with the trigger otherwise (one notable exception not really worth discussing here).
So it's really not "don't point the firearm at stuff you don't want to shoot" because guns occasionally go off on their own, magically, it's really "people make mistakes, the Swiss cheese model of accident causation is real, and this is one more thing to mitigate the impact of accidents when they inevitably happen."
All of those rules exist in order to prevent an unintended killing. They would not be necessary without a machine designed for killing. I don't know why this is so complicated. No gun present, no gunshot. Gun present, possible gunshot.
I'm not trolling. You can have all the "safety" protocols you want, but at the end of the day it still won't stop every unintended killing due to a killing machine.
The problem is people use these objective facts (none of which are in dispute so far as I know) to make completely asinine arguments like "just make some guns illegal" or "just take away everyone's guns." So that makes it very difficult to have level-headed discussions.
The problem in that case is that it kills unintentionally when it's used in a way that shouldn't end up in a discharge at all.
If you put your gun in your pants pocket and shoot your balls while running around it's on you, if you safely put your gun in a safe holster and it shoots your balls while your walking it's the gun's problem.
A nuke is a killing device, we never made one go boom unintentionally despite abusing some of them way past what's reasonable.
Yes, this specific gun with this specific design issue that doesn't exist in any other firearm, and you now can't sell for more than $100 if you can sell it at all, and is banned by almost every professional shooting sports organization, and is banned by more ranges than its not can shoot by itself in very specific circumstances.
As a self-described gun nut, thought I'd make it a little more accurate :)
And sold by a company that has lost credibility with most "gun nuts" as a result of this whole years-long (now lethal) ordeal. Anti-2Aers think that we're all defending Sig for this behaviour. We're not.
Arguing with such a politically loaded sentence is probably a waste of time. BUT that's obviously not the intention of the quote. Actual malfunction induced firing is the exception, and its still a good saying to help people try and be safe/mindful.
Not to mention even in that case there's still some movement or action leading to it nobody is saying that the sigs will just spontaneously fire while left sitting on a table.
I suppose out of context it seems out of nowhere, but if you follow some of these influencers they act like it is literally impossible for anything bad to happen with guns around.
I enjoy shooting myself (don't really do it frequently but I have a number of times at ranges) but I feel like there are a lot of people who do not take gun ownership seriously.
I also think there are a lot of people who dont take driving a car seriously enough so it isn't exclusive to guns...
This is a completely incorrect interpretation of a FMEA (failure-modes-and-effects-analysis) / "Risk Chart". ISO quality systems regulations / the army mandate engineers sit in a room and dream up every way the device could fail and/or harm someone. You then classify the risk of that harm, so in all cases an unintentional discharge would be "high risk". This does not mean the pistol has a high chance of discharging, that is a separate metric for odds of occurrence. Even if the pistol was redesigned to only have a 1 in a million chance of unintentionally discharging, the "risk" category would stay "high".
At least while I was at NASA, a high impact score (ie death) would still elevate total risk even if the likelihood was low.
The Risk Assessment Matrix Level (right most column) takes the incidence x severity into account. Even after mitigations, there were quite a few "Medium"s, almost all of which were E-1 ("Improbable: So unlikely, it can be assumed occurrence may not be experienced in the life of an item, .0001% Occurrence per item" x "Catastrophic: Could result in one or more of the following: death....")
Though millions of guns x .0001%...well...
https://smokinggun.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/gov.uscour...
I agree. FMEA has separate fields for likelihood of occurrence and severity of occurrence. I agree with this in that the severity of occurrence is high/critical. The likelihood, I don't think it described that well.
To put an analogy, I've participated in FMEA's for software systems and the underlying physical installation. The severity of losing your class A data center due to flooding or complete power loss for over 48 hours is critical. The likelihood is low depending on the data centers location.
Question is how likely were the unintentional discharge scenarios in this FMEA study?
This guy FMEAs.
The harm is always a property of the failure, independent from the likelihood. The combination of the two independent values is usually a lookup in a grid to some score. I’m not gonna look at an FMEA in my leasure time, but if there was something juicy it’d be in the article text and it didn’t convince me.
They don't care.
"The Smoking Gun" is part of the Everytown Support Fund [0], which has been lobbying for gun abolitionism. It was created in opposition of the NRA by Michael Bloomberg [1]
Just like how the NRA would skew stats against any form of gun control, an organization like Everytown would skew facts the other way around.
Firearm abolitionism and unrestricted firearm access are both equally dumb.
There is a middle ground that can be found, but the extremes on both sides make it impossible to compromise. Gun ownership is a 2nd amendment right and often needed in areas with limited population density and access to police or animal control services (try dealing with packs of feral hog like most rural communities in the American West - can't be done without .223 calibre ammo), but that doesn't mean we can't add safety and training requirements given that there is a real issue with gun smuggling that is exacerbating crime across the Americas as well as the inability to prevent and flag high risk individuals from purchasing weapons (especially via private sales).
IMO, an Israeli style model would be best - Israelis are allowed to own a private weapon, but are required to get tested and recertified every year AND need to show that they have a gun locker. All weapons are also registered and cataloged, and all gun sales need to be notified and allowed by the Ministry of Public Safety.
If Israel can do it, the US absolutely can as well.
[0] - https://smokinggun.org/about/
[1] - https://www.everytown.org/about-everytown/history/
The Swiss model would be a much more reasonable approach. Shall-issue purchase permit on passing a background check, and the requirement to keep the firearm locked up when not used. But if you live alone, your locked front door counts as "locked up."
Statistically, the problem isn't keeping scary guns away from everyone, because the vast majority of people will never shoot anyone. The whole "you're more likely to shoot a household member than an intruder" is a red herring, because the vast majority will do neither of these things. What matters is disarming the suicidally depressed, as well as a subset of people who are disproportionately likely to commit violent crime. 60-85 percent of gun deaths in the US are suicides, jurisdiction dependent. The prototypical gun homicide in the US is a young minority man with a criminal record being killed by another young minority man with a criminal record using an illegally-possessed handgun, usually involving street gang disputes and/or the illegal drug trade.
So what matters is being able to disarm people who exhibit violent tendencies and/or suicidal depression "left of bang."
> The Swiss model would be a much more reasonable approach. Shall-issue purchase permit on passing a background check, and the requirement to keep the firearm locked up when not used. But if you live alone, your locked front door counts as "locked up."
This describes how it works in Seattle, WA.
Except Washington has rolled out broad-based bans which statistically do nothing except harass law-abiding citizens. I live in Greater Seattle, and the vibe seems to be much more "ban them all" than "how do we responsibly have these tools in society." The attitude here towards guns is as irrational as the attitude in Mississippi towards people having gay sex.
The Swiss will sell you your service rifle converted to semi-auto when you leave the military, yet somehow these "assault weapons" don't cause them problems.
The Swiss also have compulsory military service for every man over 18 (women may volunteer), so the people owning these guns actually know how to handle them safely and have been trained to have some self-discipline.
I expect that the 18 week bootcamp affords an opportunity to closely observe all such conscripts and screen them for mental health disorders and behavioral problems, and that the (minimum) of 7 years of reserve service allows ongoing monitoring.
Additionally, common sense tells me that Switzerland's equivalent of "dishonorable" or "other-than-honorable" discharge would result in that person not having the opportunity to buy their service rifle, and possibly putting up roadblocks to owning a gun at all.
Therefore the people in Switzerland most likely to cause gun crime do not have ready access to them. That is quite different to how we think about it in the US.
If you were to seriously propose such a system in the US, I think you would get far more opposition from the pro-gun groups than the anti-gun groups. In fact, anti-gun groups would welcome adopting the Swiss system, since it so closes matches the legislation they have tried to enact such as magazine size restrictions in California, "red flag" laws in other states, and mandatory trigger locks. All of those laws have been opposed by groups like the NRA.
Gay sex doesn't kill 45000 people a year.
Neither do so-called "assault weapons." You're statistically more likely to have someone beat you to death with their bare fists and feet. Do you go around worrying about that every day? I don't.
Nothing is gained by conflating unrelated topics like suicide, gang violence, domestic violence, and the occasional deranged lunatic spree killer just because they all abused the same tool to commit murder.
But if you don't muddy the water like that how are you supposed to demonize guns??
Unfortunately, most people are more interested in the simple answer than in recognizing there is no simple answer. And people are remarkably poor at recognizing that those who are muddying the waters are almost certainly arguing a false position.
You know, it probably kills way more than that.
HIV transmission is way higher among men who have sex with men.
US annual HIV deaths are like under 5000 total. It's gotten way, way, way better than earlier decades.
Thanks for the info. I was imagining the whole world. I look a little above, and maybe it's Washington State really?
In any event:
1) Guns don't kill people. They don't even make the people-killing appreciably more likely.
2) Washington has about 1,000 gun murders per year
3) About 2/3 of U.S. gun deaths are suicides, so we might expect about 333 gun murders in WA in a year.
I'm really glad U.S. HIV deaths have fallen off a cliff!
The 45k number is for US total (as is the <5k number above)
WA state has about 300 murders a year, up significantly from 200-ish pre covid.
Washington is a must-issue concealed carry state though. When working at Microsoft I had to sign something saying I’d keep my gun in my car when on campus.
> So what matters is being able to disarm people who exhibit violent tendencies and/or suicidal depression "left of bang."
I agree
> The Swiss model would be a much more reasonable approach. Shall-issue purchase permit on passing a background check, and the requirement to keep the firearm locked up when not used. But if you live alone, your locked front door counts as "locked up."
I disagree simply because unlike CH, our neighboring states like Mexico, Haiti, and Jamaica are all facing severe public security issues due to US originated gun trafficking, and this blows back into the US.
Adding some additional securitization to our rules more in line with those in Israel allow us to help defend ourselves from contagion.
If the party that support the 2nd amendment also views organized crime in Mexico and Haiti as a national security risk, then using the securitization framing is an easier sell.
I'd argue Mexico, Haiti, and Jamaica are facing severe public security issues because they're failed states run by the stupid and corrupt. The guns probably make it a little worse, ja.
Yes, but then you'd have to create a database of gun purchases and that would be illegal.
https://www.thetrace.org/2016/08/atf-non-searchable-database...
You can drop the weapons catalog requirement that Israel has, and you would still add significant guardrails against misuse.
Even without Israeli style gun cataloging, the rest of the Israeli gun control requirements should be able to pass the "objective criteria" test from Buren while also reducing the risk of misuse by tying license ownership with criterias such as mental health, training, and access to safe storage.
Oh, I entirely agree. It just seems absolutely nuts that the US government (or rather the state governments, because ultimately they'd be dealing with it) cannot attribute a gun to a purchase because they've specifically made it illegal to do so.
When you're dealing with that mindset, no wonder gun control measures as unremarkable as mandatory safes and training are anathema.
The basic problem is that a list of guns is the holy grail of the gun banners. Is it any wonder that the pro gun crowd is afraid of it?
And the reality is that legally purchased guns account for a tiny fraction of gun crime. Stopping every gun purchase by even a would-be criminal is going to do very little except to the suicide rate.
And the "unremarkable" measures often have nasty hidden details. Mandatory safes? Just exactly what do you count as a safe? Doesn't take much of a requirement on a safe before it becomes something that can only rest upon a proper foundation--thus completely prohibiting many apartment and condo dwellers. Put a bolt-down requirement on it and you have disallowed all renters.
Training is looking at it backwards. We have a perfect model of how it should be handled: just look at driving. You pass a test of knowledge and a test of proficiency.
I’ve seen the standard of driving in the US. This is not the model you are looking for.
The federal statute only prohibits the AG from promulgating a rule that would require the feds or the states from maintaining a registry. While unconstitutional, many states already have one such as CA, CT, DC, HI, MD, MI, NJ, NY.
As a former legislative assistant during the Aurora shooting, it's because gun abolitionists and gun fundamentalists are extremely organized interest groups, and risk your chances during a primary.
There is a silent majority that feels the 2nd amendment and gun control can co-exist, but they are not represented by any type of organized lobbying group so that voice is not heard.
It's also become a culture war signifier, so if you are a D who is fine with controlled gun ownership instead of abolition, you will face severe lobbying from Everytown, and if you are a R who is fine with controlled permitting instead of maximalist shall-issue licensing, you will face severe lobbying from the NRA.
We can't even get anything as minor as firing pin microstamping implemented.
It's shocking how effective the opposition to it has been.
> We can't even get anything as minor as firing pin microstamping implemented
> It's shocking how effective the opposition to it has been.
It's becuase the patent for microstamping is owned by a single and very litigious company [0].
There needs to be a non-patented OSS alternative, because the margins for manufacturing are extremely low.
This is why there is pushback to microstamping from companies.
Edit: did not realize the patent expired. Good callout.
[0] - https://tac-labs.com/forensics/
The patent expired five years ago.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6886284B2/en
No, for many reasons including that the technology does not work.
And herein lies a clear demonstration of the problem.
A firing pin is designed to slam metal into metal. Do you really think a detailed pattern on the end of the pin will not soon become too blurred to be useful? Even if somebody doesn't take an abrasive to it.
And it's not like a firing pin is somehow unique to the gun. They are wear items, in time they get replaced. And you have to be able to take the moving parts of a gun apart for cleaning, there's no way to ensure a given pin doesn't get swapped to another gun.
And this once again comes back to at best only being useful in the cases where the gun was legally purchased, which is a very small part of gun crime.
Testing has demonstrated that microstamping remains readable on casings after thousands of rounds with a SEM.
Moreover, even if it wasn't, who cares? It would still be an improvement over what currently exists (unintentional microstamping) given a fair number of guns that are used in crimes have barely been fired.
Nor does it matter if someone switches the firing pin since criminals aren't likely to do that. They don't even file down serial numbers most of the time.
The fact that it isn't absolutely 100% perfect doesn't mean it isn't better.
This still comes down to the basic problem that the vast majority of crime guns were not obtained by legal means. Yes, criminals don't file down serial numbers because there's no reason to as the serial number isn't connected to them.
While the vast majority aren't obtained through legal means, a surprisingly large percentage can be connected to the individual who committed a crime with one.
According to the BJS, of those in prison in 2016 who had a firearm during the offense they were in for, 7.5% purchased it legally under their own name and 25.3% obtained it from family or friends. An older 2004 Survey of Inmates of State Correctional Facilities showed 12% obtaining them from retail and 41% from family/friends.
Criminals don't file down serial numbers not because there's no reason, but criminals don't think they'll be caught. Most simply don't think very far ahead.
Micro-stamping isn't perfect, but again, it is better. If it can lead to arrests in even a small percentage of the thousands of unsolved murders ever year, it would be a huge win with little downside.
You should reread Bruen there is not an "Objective Criteria" test for gun laws. There is a text history and tradition one which ownership licensing completely fails.
"If Israel can do it, the US absolutely can as well."
This is not just a matter of technical ability.
In practice, you cannot simply bypass current reading of the 2nd Amendment by SCOTUS, unless you have enough support to amend the Constitution again. Which, on this controversial topic, no one has.
I know, and my argument is that the Israeli model can be safely argued as falling within the current reading of the 2nd amendment, especially after NYSRPA v. Bruen
The reading of Buren allows control on concealed carry and gun ownership via objective criteria - which is what Israeli gun permitting rests on as well.
Yet, I have never seen a single organization fight for an Israeli style compromise for gun control in the US - almost all lawfare is either for abolitionism or unrestricted ownership.
OK, but this isn't a gun control story --- this is a story about a group of people that everybody, from Michael Bloomberg to the President of the NRA, agrees need to be armed.
There is a middle ground that can be found, but the extremes on both sides make it impossible to compromise.
I don't agree about this. I do not support the Everytown group (who I agree are skewing facts) but long before they came along, the pro gun lobby was absolutely intransigent on their own. Any reasonable proposal/discussion that had broad support could get derailed by second amendment absolutists. It's gotten considerably worse over the ~35 years I've been on the internet because online social communication rewards people for being assholes; so many online debates degenerate into the pro gun people just screeching that their opponents are hoplophobes or commies, and posting 'SHALL NOT ?BE INFRINGED' over and over.
I like guns and enjoy shooting, but I absolutely despise 'gun culture'and the firearms lobby. They have never been good-faith actors in my experience.
> [Nerds] sit in a room and dream up every way the device could fail and/or harm someone
Well, yeah. And as it happened they postulated the failure mode that was actually (allegedly) seen in practice. And they were right. So the "no one could have known" side of Sig's defense seems out the window here. They could have known, and they did, and relevant experts told them.
I really don't get your point here. You seem to be saying that risk analysis, in the abstract, as a whole field of practice, has no value because of the lack of certainty? But... managing uncertainty is the whole point. Do you really live your life like this? "I mean, people say fentanyl is dangerous but you never really know, right?"
I don't understand the snark. It's plain to see that the GP is arguing that the media report is misunderstanding the document.
Whether that's a correct critique or not, I don't know, but your reply is certainly misunderstanding their comment.
"Well, we should be aware that brake failure is hypothetically possible if vanishingly unlikely, and it would be a huge deal if they did fail" is not the same as "Yeah our brakes have a known flaw that makes them exceptionally prone to failure lmao IDGAF ship it"
Clearly neither of those readings is a correct interpretation of the cited research.
Look folks, I know it offends your 2A inclinations, but this is a step in a legal action. One of the arguments made by any defendant in a case like this is "This was not a foreseeable risk". And that is directly and correctly refuted by the cited report. Period. And it's right that the media report on it.
Sig guns have a failure mode that is serious and impactful, and was aware of it when it sold the hardware.
So the important bit here is that the guns failed drop testing. And that's bad.
The rest of the article seems to misunderstand FMEA style "write down every conceivable bad scenario in the universe, how bad it is, and then what you have done to stop it", and then spins this as "look at all these horrible known issues they knew about". I hope a jury doesn't view it the same way, because it would be an epic bad for safety everywhere if engineers writing down a list of bad things to avoid and mitigate was forbidden by company lawyers.
The important bit is that the guns failed drop testing and then Sig Sauer updated the design to fix the issue.
Well, and then didn’t recall them - instead favoring the ‘voluntary upgrade’. And apparently even those ‘upgraded’ under that still have this other, even bigger issue.
At that point, we're talking about different things than the FMEA mentioned in the headline.
In a nutshell, the defect that causes the guns to fire when holstered occurs when there is a small amount of pressure on the trigger. If the slide (top part of the gun) is wiggled / nudged, it will fire. Also, the gun can fire when dropped. Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
>Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
And just not having hot dog down a hallway tolerances at the slide to frame interface.
The trigger stuff lives in the bottom half of the gun and the bang stuff lives in the top half and only goes bang depending upon the relative position of the trigger stuff. So allowing the top half and the bottom half to move around a ton is generally unwise unless you make accommodations elsewhere in the design so that you still have proper relative position regardless of where in the hallway the hotdog is.
Also, they’ve had numerous issues with their triggers failing to reset correctly and/or otherwise misbehaving. That was the focus of the original ‘voluntary upgrade’.
That this giant mess of bad tolerances, sloppy change management, iffy manufacturing outsourcing, and a design which is sensitive to these issues it seems inevitable these kinds of random and hard to reproduce problems would occur. And the more they sold, the worse it would get.
Do that in something which literally can cause death and serious injury if it fails, in an environment where all your competitors designs don’t have these issues and hence users tend towards ‘round in the chamber’ and carrying them in all sorts of messy real world situations? Guaranteed disaster eventually.
Bad sig.
The brand was dead to me many years ago (extractor snapped in the middle of a course - seemed like bad metallurgy, or a bad design), but this is entirely another level of crazy.
Agreed. One of the greater examples of brand destruction of the 21st century.
There are videos online showing that this also happens with Glocks (when the trigger is depressed to the wall) [0]
Really, any gun where the sear is in the grip and the part it connects to is in the frame could have the same issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaV32HarnRY
I think Jared's video is good at conveying the mechanics of striker-fired guns, and he is completely correct that this issue exists to some degree in every striker-fired gun (and is not an issue in them). However, the parts in the P320 have so much variance that the wall is very "mushy" on some of these guns. I wouldn't be surprised if we find that these uncommanded discharges involve both movement in the trigger and movement of the slide.
It may be the case that variance is so wide that there are some P320's which are in that "depressed to the wall" state at rest, but that would require an x-ray or CAT scan of the offending guns, and I don't know if anyone other than Sig has one. There is also a safety on P320's that should be stopping this from happening, but again, it is a part with very wide variation, and on some guns it seems it doesn't work (Sig issued a recall over this already).
I agree with Jared that this problem is a lot trickier and weirder than people give it credit for. The sort of core of the issue is that everything about the gun was done cheaply and they flew a little too close to the sun, but I believe they have no idea what in particular they cheaped out on too much.
I understand your speculation on the amount of variance, but I haven't seen any data to support it.
Sig's "recall" was a drop-safety issue, where in certain orientations the weight of the trigger could generate enough momentum to allow an unintentional discharge.
There's plenty of data on the variances of P320 parts being much larger than specified by Sig, and it has been presented in a few court cases. Root causing this issue to tolerances hasn't been done, though.
I'm curious what the different levels of "cheaping out" saved in terms of manufacturing cost.
So am I. I expect that Sig doesn't know what to fix here because taking every part up to be more precise is very expensive.
This video does not show a Glock firing with a "small amount of pressure on the trigger", which is what the OP said the issue w/ the P320 is
It does. This whole "small amount of pressure on the trigger thing" stemmed from a video by "Wyoming Gun Project", in which he did the exact same thing to a P320.
Glock, unlike Sig, uses a trigger safety. It doesn't just require any trigger pressure, the lever safety needs to be pushed back. Is this bad? Of course. The Sig flaw is sig-nificantly worse.
I'm pretty sure you're not implying otherwise, but it's an outrageous design flaw regardless and selling these while being aware of the problem (to the military no less!) should carry devastating consequences for the manufacturers.
The gun firing when the trigger is being pulled is not a design flaw, and it is 100% mitigated with the safety that the military has in their guns.
Nobody is talking about the gun firing when the trigger is pulled. The gun is firing when the trigger is explicitly not pulled. Even if you're talking about the video the parent comment linked, the very first few seconds of the video show the gun discharging without a finger anywhere near the trigger. That's a deadly design flaw that in any other industry should have resulted in a full recall. Here, it was known and covered up while innocent people who made no operational error were maimed. To suggest otherwise is denying objective reality.
I think one of the best demonstrations of this, with detail on the amount of travel required for most striker-fired handguns is this video [0]. Lots of detail and relatively methodical.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L17Mq7XxtlE
So a classic sig double action or 1911 wouldn't be effected? He video says striker fired specifically. Cocked and locked I'm not sure how you would make this happen.
Hammer-fired guns have a similar issue if you drop them directly on the hammer (or on parts that can move the hammer) when the hammer is cocked. When the hammer is not cocked, there's no available energy in the firing mechanism to discharge the gun. Striker fired guns are effectively in the cocked state at rest, though. In a "cocked and locked" state, you would need the drop to disengage or overcome the safety, not just the normal trigger mechanism.
Not affected in the same way. The original M1911 design has a floating firing pin held back only by spring tension, so in theory it might be possible to get it to discharge without pressing the trigger by dropping it straight onto the muzzle from a sufficient height. This is so unlikely in practice that it's not a real concern. Some newer variants also incorporate an extra internal safety that blocks the firing pin from moving.
1911, and 2011 going off when dropped:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wD9-6GUkTUk
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eT1tlBR1W-w
With the safety on too. Interesting
You have to partially pull the trigger to release the safety lever on the stiker. Once you do that, all bets are off, you have manually overridden one of the main designed safety features.
It is like saying, if you tape the trigger safety down on the Glock and drop it can go off, therefore it is a design defect.
You're kidding me right? I thought guns were at least somewhat safe in general but putting the trigger safety on the trigger is...
I'm used to the kind of engineering where the goal is not to kill people I guess...
I believe you may be confusing the type of safeties that block even intentional firings with safeties that try to block unintended firings (such as from drops or other mechanical stress). Pistols have multiple levels of safeties involved.
A trigger safety is meant to ensure that the trigger must be intentionally pulled (as opposed to moving during an impact) for the firing pin to be able to release and hit cartridge primer.
The 1911 famously has a grip safety, which needs to be depressed for the trigger to move. This is to try to ensure someone has to be gripping it with intent to fire, for it to be able to do so. While much safer than other pistols at the time, 100+ years later the design is relatively flawed, and isn’t truly drop safe, as the firing pin can still move.
The purpose of a safety on the trigger is to prevent the trigger from moving due to inertia if it is dropped. There are many different safety mechanisms on guns, this is just one, for one specific case.
Sig has good engineering videos where they walk through many of the mechanisms on the M17/18/320.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPKMu47uWXQ
> Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
And even by Sig themselves in other models. It seems to be a problem specific to the P320 / M17.
Also, does not help that the US Army does NOT want this FMECA document released. From the article that is cited the US Army's project manager & legal counsel gave this response to help Sig justify keeping the document sealed:
> The Army position would be to oppose the distribution to the public of the > FMECA document as it potentially reveals critical information about the > handgun (design, reliability, performance, etc.).
Wow that’s asinine. Like, russian-tier levels of lying straight to your face.
I should really know to expect less, but they yet again managed to slide under even my low expectations of sense.
Pistols are the least important weapon in a war. Their capabilities are essential identical, and you can replace every sig with a Glock and the only thing that’ll change is whose pockets the money fills.
The idea of an enemy trying to plan a battle based on the flaws of a particular pistol is exceedingly silly. Even Blackadder has gags more grounded in reality.
Army is going to try to limit distribution of any internal document, a version of deny-all security. There could be more general insights to be obtained by enemies, not specifics, and this information can add to other intel to build a theory. For example, if the pistol spec said "oh we only need 5 rounds", then that could be evidence towards Army not taking close quarters combat seriously. It would not be used to build a "just dodge 5 times then charge" doctrine.
>Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
No. They are mitigated by a firing pin block that must be lifted by the full travel of the trigger, so that the block is lifted out of the way, for the firing pin to access the primer.
https://www.shootingillustrated.com/media/5nsj1a3l/firpins.j...
You forgot to mention that the gun also needs to have a bullet chambered. Not exactly how I would carry a holstered weapon, but hey, I’m 100% certain people do exactly that. Especially in a military situation so I’m not judging.
"There has to be a round in the chamber for a round to be fired" seems sort of tautological if I'm being honest.
Very, very few serious people would argue that anyone carrying a firearm should carry it without a round in the chamber. Yes, "Israeli carry" is a thing, but is almost entirely endorsed simply as a training carry-over from a time when people carried different weapons of widely varying mechanical safety features in a very unique high-threat environment.
If you're carrying a firearm professionally, or in the US "recreationally" for personal protection, carrying without a round in the chamber will be seen by most people as a pretty stupid decision.
As a Sig 320 owner, and someone that knows at least 3 other sig 320 owners, I disagree. None of us ever carry our weapon chambered. I probably know 10+ guys that own guns, including a few police officers, and I'm going to ask the officers about this because honestly, I would be surprised if they even carried their weapons chambered.
I wouldn't carry with a round in the chamber if I carried a 320 either.
There is zero chance that those police carry un-chambered
Your experience is an outlier.
My father was taught to use condition 3 carry (unloaded chamber) with a 1911 in the 1970's US Navy. It all depends on circumstances.
You might not, but this is exactly how a pistol like this should be carried.
The usual response to this is that if you don't carry with a round in the chamber, you could spend the rest of your life racking the slide.
That's exactly how guns are supposed to be carried. Exceptions exist, but if you're carrying a gun you ought to be ready to use it.
Certainly not the first time something like this happened. During Vietnam, the US Army sent soldiers into combat with the M16 knowing that it had major issues that often caused it to jam. We’ll never know exactly people were killed by such a bad decision, but it quickly became infamous early in the war.[0]
0: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/m16-rifle-viet...
There was nothing wrong with the M16/AR-15; the Marines had been issued the weapon in Vietnam as well (with different ammo than the army received) and it worked fine.
The issue was that the Army Bureau of Ordinance insisted on making 5.56mm ammunition with a propellant composition different from the one that Stoner had specified when designing the weapon, one that was entirely unsuitable and led to jamming.
Yes but it was worse due to design problems with the gun as well, seeing as how they did change it - I.e. adding chrome plating to the chamber and barrel which reduced fouling, and actually including a proper cleaning kit.
The chrome lining was done to significantly increase the service life of the barrel and to reduce corrosion in some environments. Prior to the M16, chrome lining was only used on machine guns due to the volume of rounds that went through them.
Far more rounds were put through the M16 by soldiers than prior weapons like the M14. Despite the chrome lining, M16 barrels still wear out over time and have to be replaced.
"in some environments" being the Vietnam war the US was involved in, in reaction to casualty reports where a large number of men were killed with their rifles broken down for repair likely due to mid battle stoppages.
And the same applies to number of rounds: the entire point of a 5.56mm cartridge was to give soldiers more ammo so they could sustain volume of fire in the field: it was a design goal.
If design changes fixed a serious flaw with a weapon, then it was a flawed design.
There was nothing wrong with the M16, it worked very well for a number of years. Then the US Army unilaterally modified the ammunition to save money in such a way as to make it no longer within specification for the weapon. Predictably, the use of out-of-spec ammunition caused issues.
The Army never changed the ammunition back. Instead, the weapon was modified (M16A1) to be compatible with the formerly out-of-spec ammunition and the issues went away.
You can't blame the M16 for the US Army using ammunition that wasn't fit for purpose.
A dishonourable mention for the original A1 version of the British SA80, which required high levels of lubrication to operate properly, and as a result often jammed in sandy environments... like Kuwait and Iraq [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA80
I seem to recall the A0 also used to yeet the magazine when you ran with it across your chest on the sling, because the mag release button had no guard (but that might be me misremembering it. )
And the Berretta slide failures. And many similar issues for all kinds of things.
I was going to mention this! I was on a range and watched a slide completely break in half after firing. The Beretta’s where terrible.
Are you referring to the M9/92? I don't own one but I've heard it's one of those guns that everyone who was issued one hates it, and everyone who bought one on the civilian market loves it - the implication being they just don't shoot it enough to run into any issues.
Here are some follow-ups to the article cited. Pretty wild what Sig's response has been:
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/the-document-sig-sauer...
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/sig-sauer-vp-consumer-...
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/new-unsealed-sig-sauer...
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/a-year-before-the-army...
This article makes me wonder about comparative analysis against other models and brands. It is good Sig Sauer produced a failure mode analysis. Where are the competitive analysis documents?
It also makes me wonder if the reason it can't fix some of these issues is because it is working around patent issues.
Pure speculation.
It appears based on some other court documents that Sig with the P320 intentionally excluded a trigger tab safety based on marketing decisions to be competitive, which every other striker-fired handgun has included. That along with some other issues appears to be the basis for where the P320 design went wrong.
> This article makes me wonder about comparative analysis against other models and brands. It is good Sig Sauer produced a failure mode analysis. Where are the competitive analysis documents?
Presumably buried in the woods along with whatever shenanigans went down to award XM17 to Sig over Glock without going through the full predescribed testing in the first place
The reason they can’t fix these issues is someone in leadership likely literally has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and is quite literally incapable of acknowledging a mistake or problem. To the point they’ll inevitably torpedo the company rather than take any ownership or responsibility.
If the Board is smart, they’ll fire the person before it gets to that point - but if they were smart, they probably wouldn’t have hired the type of person to get them into this mess in the first place.
What is the personality disorder that makes someone with no medical training believe they can diagnose "likely" mental health disorders in Generic Executive in a company they have no direct relationship with?
What is the personality disorder where someone refuses to consider the possibility of something happening despite a public and long term pattern of repeated behavior which matches that possibility occurring, unless some otherwise impossible bit of evidence from an expert who has a duty to never talk to them about it weighs in?
That's not really an Occam's Razor conclusion. I would say the reason is that multiple lawsuits were already filed, and to admit the gun was defective essentially means you lose all the suits overnight. At the time, they chose to ride it out because they didn't know how many of these guns were actually defective.
My guess is it was a perfect storm where the defect rate was low enough to escape their quality control but high enough (or perhaps delayed long enough, meaning it takes years for the defect to appear) to lead to a clear signal after the horse got out of the barn. Enough suits were filed that they perhaps risk bankruptcy if they lose all of them.
That's just my speculation, and seems to be more plausible than some side effect from mental illness.
Have you seen this? [https://x.com/sigsauerinc/status/1898099442172989921?lang=en] or this? [https://www.instagram.com/p/DG6RkWCpkdw/?img_index=1]
That was less than a year ago, and well after these issues have been escalating for years.
The co-ordinated gaslighting, projection, denial, etc. are also a clear pattern going back years as well.
The employees clearly being aware there are issues and being afraid to speak up due to internal retaliation, the lawsuits against entities merely trying to protect themselves from preventing people from carrying P320’s into their facilities until this gets figured out, etc. as well.
No one goes to this amount of effort to deny they have a problem (and control others to prevent them from acknowledging there is a problem) without an impetus like that.
I’m not saying the underlying engineering problem is a result of a mental health problem with someone in leadership. Though it likely doesn’t help!
I’m saying the market problem SIG is having (and the serious consequences of it) are due to the mishandled response to a real issue in engineering/manufacturing in a way which stinks clearly to me of NPD.
It’s the doubling down, attacking anyone who notices a real issue, gaslighting everyone, etc.
Hell, when even Brandon Herrera is telling them to fuck off due to the gaslighting?
It’s epic in this case. And NPD folks have a nasty habit of ‘taking down the ship’ as they escalate. It’s damn near the defining consequence that makes it a personality disorder.
Which SIG is definitely heading in that direction.
But hey, it looks like Gun Jesus has an opinion on it too [https://youtu.be/rjEhgXAALL8].
I agree that the tone was really awful and hostile. I'd give the company a 50% or less chance of recovering from this.
A few months ago I read a story about a woman who worked at sig and was sexually harassed by her boss and was demoted and fired. I can't remember if she was involved (as a witness) in an injury lawsuit about the P320 or what, but reading her story made me remove any possible sympathy I could have for her. Makes me sad I bought my P365 even though it's a great weapon.
> "In a company of our size, would anyone ever believe that there was a real issue going on, and we wouldn’t address it?"
*awkward silence*
> someone in leadership likely literally has Narcissistic Personality Disorder
What a wild, unjustified claim. Not every arrogant fool has NPD. If you want to throw that claim around you best be ready to cite the clinical definition.
The clinical definition where someone is unable to recognize any fault or problem in their behavior to the point of severe pathology, and delusion, including attacking or manipulating others?
Have you seen the press releases and lawsuits? It’s quite literally crazy what they’re doing.
The actions of the company are irrational. That's not remotely the question.
And executives set the culture of a company, and someone with the described personality characteristics are particularly prone to enforce that type of behavior on an entire companies culture.
I’ve seen it play out quite clearly before in person.
Why work so hard to continue to avoid the actual issue and clearly present behaviors and facts?
Or do you think such persistent and blatant pathological behavior just happens naturally from otherwise well adjusted executives acting in good faith?
And clearly since you've seen it play out that way, there are no other possible situations that could result in similar behavior. The possibility that a public admission of fault could play a role in ongoing or future lawsuits definitely doesn't have anything to do with it. Nope, only one conceivable motivation for hiding the truth, which is conveniently located in a single guy, who is definitely not just a run-of-the-mill arrogant fool.
I take it you haven’t actually read the linked posts from SIG? Read them and then tell me I’m wrong.
No lawyer or PR person in their right mind would EVER okay that type of response. And with the facts as we know them coming out, those responses were deeply pathological.
You know, I actually hadn't, but they were nothing I didn't expect. Of course they were lying. Lots of people without NPD lie. They were in a hole, and they thought digging was their best way out. Playing on fears of gun-grabbing is a plausible if clumsy angle to take. If their design had been less borked, they might even have gotten away with it. That's why lots of unethical but otherwise grounded PR types have historically okay'd this kind of thing.
You can debate whether they're still "in their right mind" by your preferred definition, but it's increasingly preposterous to say their behavior is evidence of an executive with NPD. This is just not that special, dude. People are just like this.
Uh huh, sure. Definitely nothing particularly spectacular here at all.
How many gun companies have had this level of scandal again? The only one I can think of is Taurus in the 80’s.
Doesn’t sound normal at all, actually.
What really amuses me about these kinds of conversations is how invested people are in insisting that when it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is at the pond with the ducks, and looks like a duck - it totally isn’t a duck, because… I don’t know. They don’t like ducks? Or ducks are boring?
Oh, it's pretty spectacular. Just not evidence for NPD. That was your thesis, right, this very specific clinical diagnosis? Do you still remember that? You desperately want to believe this bird you found at the lake is a rare, special species of duck, but it's just a mallard.
And pray tell, what would count as evidence?
> you best be ready to cite the clinical definition.
And not the vibes-only version you tried in your first reply. Notably, said clinical definition is not applicable to a company as a whole.
sure dude.
Move briskly and kill people?
That's a deadly twist to "move fast and break things" motto.
Seriously, Sig Sauer. You are making weapons, not disposable pens, and the world leading disposable pen company literally uses "standards x 1.5" as their baseline.
Sig Sauer: “You take some of the shots you don’t make”
> world leading disposable pen company literally uses "standards x 1.5" as their baseline
Curious, what's this referring to?
Bic.
They make pens, lighters and razor blades, at least.
For their lighters, they use engineering resins instead of simple plastics. They have their internal standards stricter than EU ones for temperature and drop resistance.
They make their own inks for their pens according to their own standards instead of getting from someone. Their razor blades last at least 25% longer than their competitors, and they sell for much cheaper.
They are a company of contradictions. Their items are disposable, yet put many "higher tier" items to shame by being better, longer lasting and cheaper at the same time.
They are fundamentally an engineering and manufacturing company. It’s the same ethos as some Japanese manufacturers who put the effort to produce reliable, accurate tools for cheap and where the marketing department haven’t taken over. They really ought to be better understood.
Yes, and I applaud them for what they do and how they do it. Hope they never change.
There's another article that is cited where Sig with someone else was apparently developing the fixes to resolve these issues years before the gun was actually tested with the US Army, but didn't deploy the fixes until they were pressured:
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/a-year-before-the-army...
And those "fixes" didn't fully resolve the issues.
Those fixes apparently resolved the drop safety issues. The uncommanded discharges that have been in the news as of late—where holstered P320s seemingly discharge on their own—is an entirely separate issue. Sig denies that there's a problem, blaming holster designs, debris in holsters, and people lying to cover up their own carelessness.
One thing this article fails to mention about the Air Force incident is that the Air Force has made an arrest for "making a false official statement, obstruction of justice and involuntary manslaughter."
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2025/08/08...
Sig claims the issue was resolved. Keep in mind that Sig never admitted to the issue. They only issued a voluntary upgrade and never issued a safety recall.
Yes, Sig should have issued a recall instead of doing a "voluntary upgrade."
Nevertheless, is anyone actually claiming that the upgraded P320 is not drop safe? The issue people are talking about these days is holstered P320s apparently discharging uncommanded, apart from any drops.
I see these as potentially the same thing depending on the details. There are some videos that show the gun was in a holster and not being messed with, etc. It also seems it could be from something hitting the holster (most reports include this). Whether the impact is from being dropped or being struck in the holster (or even vibrations as the one report mentions) is essentially the same - kinetic energy transfer to the gun. The question now is are some of the reports of discharging in the holster due to lies, holster design, debris, etc. I haven't found any official drop testing with the new FCU that found an issue (unofficially there are some, but who knows if the person really has the new FCU in those posts).
They are not the same issue. The drop safety issue was when the pistol was dropped at a particular angle (that wasn't part of standard tests—how it was missed!), the trigger was massive enough and the trigger pull was light enough that inertia would lead to the trigger moving to the rear, causing the firearm to discharge. It was a very specific failure nothing like any of the alleged uncommanded discharges.
The trigger movement wasn't enough to fully depress from my understanding. The problem is, even a slight depression of the trigger disengages the striker safeties. Most of the uncommanded discharges dod alleged that the gun or holder were struck. There are multiple standards for drop tests requiring various angles and heights.
While I agree with the title of the article, some of the contents seem a little over the top in the way they present them. We would need to see the document to know how bad it really is. Many of the failure modes could be user dependent for lack of training (ie finger in trigger guard when holstering). They also don't say which failure modes were fixed and what remained. That said, all you need is one valid failure mode to be dangerous.
"Sig Sauer also stated that the manual safeties on M17 and M18 pistols would resolve some of the issues,"
This would only be the training dependent ones. Mechanically, the safety only blocks the trigger and does nothing to block the striker or sear.
> They also don't say which failure modes were fixed and what remained.
The article links a document[0] which lists them. My reading of this is that it's not listing issues that were found in the P320, but issues that can occur in handguns in general. One of the items is "unsafe hammer decock", which has never been possible with the P320 because it does not have a hammer. It is listed as eliminated.
The remaining medium risks are:
- The user might accidentally pull the trigger by resting their finger on it when they do not intend to fire the gun
- Mishandling the gun might cause a foreign object to pull the trigger
- A drop or vibration might cause the gun to fire
- The user might accidentally pull the trigger a second time due to motion during recoil
- The user may accidentally pull the trigger while clearing a jam
- A broken firing pin could lodge in the firing position, causing the gun to fire when the slide closes
- The user might accidentally pull the trigger during holstering or unholstering
- The sear might fail to retain the striker, causing an uncommanded discharge when chambering a round, or a second uncommanded shot after an intentional shot
- Defective ammunition could rupture and injure the shooter or bystanders
- Recoil can lead to repetitive motion injuries
- Incorrect disassembly and reassembly can lead to a firearm which does not function correctly
Two of these (drop/vibration, failure to retain striker) describe the current uncommanded discharge problem. Five of the issues are different ways someone with insufficient training might mishandle a gun and pull the trigger unintentionally.
[0] https://smokinggun.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/gov.uscour...
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You are commenting on a post written by "Everytown for Gun Safety" one of the largest gun control groups in the country, so this is definitely part of a campaign by the “anti-gun mob”.
In my circles, what was astounding was the right wing gun club were doubly offended by this attempted blame. Either because they were offended for being called anti-gun leftists for having concern over the p320 or because Sig seemed to be ducking responsibility with some Trumpian style PR. Maybe both. I recall seeing comments like “it’s not the left, they don’t even know what a f**n sear is”
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Are you referring to [Harlon Cater: the man who militarized the cops and the NRA](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1KenPS9FUFfumy2D3auvuR?si=F...)?
I've only been around "gun culture" for 5-6 years or so, but not a single person I know in the fairly conservative area of my fairly conservative state thinks talking shit about a gun company means you're anti-gun - especially Sig which everyone hates now.
Nobody takes the NRA seriously or cares anything about what they do, either, so maybe I just happen to be in a sane pocket of the culture but other than the obvious paid shills like GBRS who are terrible human beings anyway, even on YouTube and other sources everyone has been talking shit on Sig for a year or longer.
> maybe I just happen to be in a sane pocket of the culture
Same in my circle too. NRA is perceived as an embezzling joke that spends more on yachts than preserving the right to keep and bear arms, and Sig is an untrustworthy joke that is allergic to taking accountability.
Sure! Now you feel that way about the NRA.
I’m talking about early 1990s until their recent fall from grace.
Eh, this is someone in SIG leadership using every scapegoat and excuse they can to avoid having to acknowledge or take responsibility for their screwup, instead compounding it to the point where it will seriously hurt the company - maybe even torpedo them.
The things you’re talking about give them some cover/mechanisms, but most other manufacturers are looking on in horror at this, not copying them.
Yeah American gun culture is now substantially LARPers kitting up like they're going to the front lines.
Ironically they call people who are into sportsmanship "fudders" and any gun that doesn't have a picatinny rail and a 20-round clip a "fudd gun." The reference is to "Elmer Fudd."
Being a Fudd isn't about being into sportsmanship. It's about opposing the civilian ownership of firearms besides bolt action rifles and non-semiautomatic shotguns.
You can find Fudd being applied to all manner of behaviors, it’s certainly not universally a gun control label.
USPSA competitors will refer to IDPA competitors as Fudds just because of the scoring differences.
It’s really just like calling someone a boomer but in a gun context.
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Yes we all know the difference between a clip and a magazine. This isn't adding anything to the discussion.
I think the idea that if you don't know the basic names of something your opinion on it is suspect is a fair criticism. Especially with the very odd reference to a 20-round magazine. There is no state in the country where a 20-round AR magazine is legal and the standard-capacity 30-round magazine is not. Virginia has a 20-round maximum but only on handguns.
It should be acknowledged that the commenter is an avid NPR listener (nothing wrong with that) who doesn't have any skin in the game (something wrong with that, at least per his commentary).
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I wonder if a manual safety here would've helped. There is this idea in the gun world that a gun has multiple safeties, like a trigger safety, striker safety etc, disassembly safety, disconnector safety, ...
And the way they are presented is in a way that they stack. But they don't.
Let's say the striker safety has failed and you drop the gun. It goes off. Even if you have a trigger safety. Or a disconnector safety.
Not in this case. There are many different kinds of safeties, and they aren't magic off switches.
Consider a computer program (with a UI mated to underlying mechanics) that talks to a database.
In this case, just because the frontend (the trigger) has a "safety" on it such that it guards against initiating a chain of events that results in something being written to the database, the backend generally remains capable of it anyway.
So, if you have some other logic or condition that can start that API call (let's assume the program fires off a bunch of random inputs to various APIs if you physically drop the computer it's running on, and then you drop it), the DB write may still happen even though it was never triggered from the frontend.
Now, you can do various things to guard against that known behavior- from ensuring the activity chain started on the frontend to physically disconnecting the computer from the database until you're ready to write- but at the end of the day the machine has to be capable of performing the write immediately when commanded, and the sacrifices you're going to make to enable that will be controlled by your engineering and testing.
In this case, the trigger (and other associated safeties) are the "frontend", the mechanical workings are the "backend", and "the gun fires" is "a DB operation".
The M17 (military version of the the P320) _has_ a manual safety.
> multiple ways the pistol could fire without an intentional trigger pull
That doesn't sound ideal.
Master of the understatement :)
I wonder how many people died when police encounters were escalated to “shots fired” by their faulty Sig.
It’s one thing for a gun to go off and potentially hit someone but it’s another when the first round fired triggers 4 cops to empty a mag each.
Are there a number of police shootings where the officer claims his gun "went off"?
One of the first rules of gun safety is never point the weapon at something you aren't intending to shoot. So by the time they are pointing their guns at a suspect, actually firing probably happens a lot? Or are cops actually trained to hold a person at gunpoint (I don't believe the TV dramas and movies where this happens constantly are realistic in this regard).
If so, it seems very risky, considering potential manufacturing or design defects such as discovered with the Sig.
American cops get surprisingly little training and all the public-recorded videos show cops pulling out their guns to to escalate and intimidate, even in the seemingly innocuous situation like a traffic stop.
I wouldn't believe American cops are trained with "safety first" rule in mind. The evidence doesn't seem to support it.
https://hub.wsu.edu/law-justice-realtime/2015/11/18/the-incr...
When exactly an officer is trained to pull their firearm will vary by department.
I'm sure every defense attorney in the country is checking what firearms the officers were issued for their clients where it might make a difference.
Pretty sure people have been shouting about this for years. There have been a half dozen accidental discharges by police officers with most reports of no contact with the trigger. There’s a trigger update available to fix the problem that sig claims doesn’t exist. There’s have been multiple injuries and a few deaths. This report coupled with the community and law enforcement reports stack up to some pretty damning evidence of what they knew and when they knew it.
Scary to think that I almost bought a P320 before I decided against it for a different reason.
Same, fortunately my local shooting range has a good selection of firearms to try. I tried the P320 and P365. I had been considering the P365, but it was so snappy I reasoned the otherwise completely boring P320 would be a better fit for my needs. However, it was close enough to another firearm I own that I decided to cool-off and see if I still wanted it in a month... then this all broke.
My girlfriend has a P365X. I wouldn't touch a P320 with a ten foot pole, but the 365 and its variants have proven pretty reliable for many people. It is definitely snappy though, but most "subcompacts" are, because physics.
Yeah, to that point I’ve been interested in trying out a Shadow Systems CRp. But haven’t found a place carrying them..
Not at all firearm specific, but "I'll get this tomorrow if I still remember I want it" has saved me countless thousands of dollars in my life.
I bought an M17 many years ago, and sold it a little over a year ago.
My local store will still take them but it's $100 store credit only.
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Well that settles it… I’m never buying a Sig Sauer
There has been no repeatable method discovered to make the p320 discharge without a trigger pull. The airforce arrested and charged someone with homicide in the most recent incident. Lacking evidence and repeatability all these incidents represent subjectively reported anecdotes.
It reminds me of the spate of reports of people dying while cleaning a gun. If you know anything about firearms you know this is not possible. People I know in law enforcement said it was a way of not saying someone committed suicide.
> If someone can just show us how to replicate [these uncommanded discharges] we will absolutely look at this from all aspects to make sure there isn’t any truth to this. In a company of our size, would anyone ever believe that there was a real issue going on, and we wouldn’t address it?”
This is exactly how I sound when I get a bug that is hard to repro. Just like these guns, there's evidence that the bug happened, but it's really hard to figure out how. Still a bug. People are still dead.
Uncommanded discharges are very well reproduced at this point.
At the very least that I'm aware of, there was initial work by Youtuber "3 P320s In A Trenchcoat" showing a series of ways to get the striker to drop w/o touching the trigger. More recently, a Youtuber with Wyoming in their channel name showed that they could reproduce them with just the slightest trigger movement in conjunction with wiggling the slide.
This last one is the most damning IMO. You can dismiss it because there's a screw in the trigger but he shows in a separate video that it's not actually screwed into the frame or anything - it's just there to keep the < 0.5mm of slack out of the trigger. Once that's accomplished, all you have to do is wiggle the slide around for a round to get discharged. He does it on the first attempt - even he didn't expect it to be that easy.
It's very easy to see how a police officer jostling around with a suspect or getting in and out of their car can cause the trigger and the slide to move at the right time to cause this issue.
That's not what that experiment is showing. If you move the trigger by 1mm and jostle the slide, nothing will happen. You have to take the trigger _to the wall_, and then 0.5mm further, and then wiggle the slide.
> vice president of commercial sales, said, “If someone can just show us how to replicate [these uncommanded discharges] we will absolutely look at this from all aspects to make sure there isn’t any truth to this.
Am I reading it correctly: if you provide us with a detailed bug report we will make sure to properly justify why we think it is not a bug and "works as intended"? :)
Reads to me like they’re gonna get rid of you.
What a shit way to phrase this. What makes these corporate monkeys lose the ability to speak normally?
I bought a gun three years ago. The P320 would have been my favorite, but so many police officers shot their calves and feet. I didn't really wanted that.
I don't believe people on Sauer's payroll for a second. They earn their money shilling these faulty guns.
I just bought something else and that's that.
Biggest issue here is the lack of clarity. I truly don't know if there is an issue with the pistol and as such I simply wont buy a Sig. The risk just isn't worth it. This is devastating for the Sig brand whether there is an issue or not. Tough spot to be in for a brand.
Note that not only has Sig Sauer lied about this and attempted to gaslight people[1], they have also sued organizations to force them to continue using the pistol after they chose to discontinue use due to the dangers[2]
----
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DG6RkWCpkdw/#
[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/gunmaker-sues-washingtons-p...
I don't know much about guns so maybe can help me understand. How is it possible that a holstered gun has pressure in the trigger in the first place? And also, shouldn't the safety always be on?
Many modern handguns do not have a manually activated safety. The Sig M17/M18 does, but the safety only blocks the trigger from moving rearward far enough to fire.
It may not block the trigger from moving enough to disengage an internal, automatic safety that prevents the firing pin from traveling all the way forward if it is released due to a malfunction. It is also possible that the firing pin block safety does not always work even if the trigger is fully forward.
consumer versions of this pistol do not have a manual safety
they have internal safety mechanisms to prevent discharge, and these are important if you carry with a round chambered - in a striker-fired pistol, the firing pin is under tension and is only being restrained by the trigger and internal safeties
this is why I do not carry with a round chambered, if you appendix carry and something goes wrong, you will be missing an important appendage
This is why I carry a gun I trust. I keep one chambered at all times, pointing at my junk. I am not concerned about my junk. I am much more concerned about not being able to get a shot off in time if I ever need to use it.
Common failures would be to use the wrong holster, defective holster, or get some object in the holster that could snag the trigger as you put it in.
Some guns, striker fired, do not have safeties as you may think of them.
For anyone wanting a quick breakdown of the current situation: the Sig Sauer P320 is a striker-fired handgun, which means the firing pin is spring loaded and retained by a sear. Other handguns are hammer-fired, where the trigger (or slide actuation) cocks the hammer. Other popular striker-fired guns include the Glock and Smith and Wesson M&P series. Frequently, striker-fired pistols come without safeties, but optionally add them.
The P320 was popular as it was designed as a modular system, allowing a single FCU (firing control unit, basically a trigger and striker assembly) to be independent and swappable with other parts of the handgun: grip, slide, barrel, etc. This allows for a single platform to serve multiple needs: concealed carry, compact, full-size, or even competition models, as well as be transferrable across calibers. The magazine design also allowed for more rounds to be carried in compact configurations.
The P320 was selected by the US Army [0] as the official replacement for the Beretta M9 as a service-issued sidearm, officially designated the M17 or M18 (in 9mm).
In 2020 SIG SAUER initiated a "voluntary upgrade program" [1] that swapped various components of the trigger to prevent unintended discharge (UD) events that could occur when the pistol dropped in certain orientations. These changes became standard for the M17 and all P320 manufactured after.
Recently, there have been very high-profile cases and investigations around UD events, the most recent being by an event in the Air Force that led to the death of an airman. In that case the Air Force put a suspension on the firearm during the investigation but eventually arrested the airman responsible, as they determined he had lied about the events [2].
Regardless of the specific failure modes of the weapon, there is a stigma around it, resulting in various law enforcement agencies switching from it or ranges banning the firearm. This has been popularized by incidents caught on video and somewhat viral videos of testing the firearm in a variety of scenarios.
All in all, the P320 is one of the most mass-produced firearms in the world, and I would not be surprised to see Sig Sauer continue to fight in the court of public opinion to defend the reputation of the firearm, in what I would deem a losing strategy.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIG_Sauer_M17
[1] - https://www.sigsauer.com/p320-voluntary-upgrade-program
[2] - https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2025/08/08...
Those guns can probably hurt someone!
According to a court exhibit, Sig Sauer identified several deadly risks with its P320 pistols as early as 2017.
An important point to recognize is that gun manufacturers have almost no product liability exposure due to laws pushed by the NRA.
Of course the NRA pitched these laws to their members as protecting against gun violence victims suing the manufacturer, but they also slipped in that gun manufacturers have no legal responsibility to provide guns to buyers that do not fire unless the trigger is pulled.
If you're referring to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act[0] passed in 2005, that's not true. It only bars lawsuits against gun manufacturers and dealers for criminal misuse of their products, not for hazardous defects.
Remington settled a class action lawsuit[1] concerning rifles that could fire without a trigger pull filed after the passage of that law.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerce_...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/remington-rifle-settlement-i...
You're probably referencing a New Hampshire law that prevents product liability lawsuits against gun manufacturers for not including manual safeties. That law would not prevent product liability lawsuits in cases where guns discharge without the trigger being actuated.
> they also slipped in that gun manufacturers have no legal responsibility to provide guns to buyers that do not fire unless the trigger is pulled.
Where does this idea come from? If this is the case, the document being discussed in the OP would not even exist, because there would be no need to document situations causing unintentional discharge.
> Where does this idea come from?
It seems to be acquired through social osmosis, i.e. hearing people talk about it and then repeating their assertions as if it were a fact - usually with subtle changes colored by the speakers own world view - until some version of "truth" permeates society. I guess you could consider it like a game of telephone at a societal level. The Citizens United case is another great example where what people think it held is very different from what it actually held. It's also frustrating given the fact that we live in a time where the barrier to verify these claims is incredibly low or even non-existent because of the internet.
Slightly more cynical take - it comes from gun-control advocates who want to repeal all of the firearms provisions in the PLCA lying about what it does to generate more public support for its repeal.
People who just dislike guns (or dislike the people who like guns) then repeat it forever, even after proven wrong.
I am sure that those people exist, by how many are they and what kind of power do they have? To me it seems that they are convenient boogeymen every time someone suggests a sensible reform that would make gun circulation less of a problem (like restrictions for criminals and mentally unstable people or background checks). I don’t doubt your sincerity, but this is just too simple a point of view for such a complex and nuanced situation.
Pretty much everything out of Giffords is a complete lie[0], for some context. I'm sure there are gun control advocacy groups not as blatant as they are but that's the one I'm most familiar with, in part because they're the most egregious. They command decent power in Washington still.
I think your examples make a good point though. There are absolutely times and places where someone's right to gun ownership can and should be suspended or even outright denied - the same as we do with freedom of speech, voting, or any other right. But it's already illegal in every state for recently released felon to own a gun - only 12 states have some sort of automatic renewal of gun rights and most of them are 10 years after release for non-violent offenses only.
It depends on your definition of "mentally unstable" but there are several mental health questions on the form you have to fill out for the ATF if you buy a firearm. Paradoxically in the 50s-70s there was a huge push to deinstitutionalize mental health treatment, close the vast majority of mental asylums, and make it much harder to involuntarily commit someone, but that's also the primary mechanism by which you prevent someone from acquiring a firearm on mental health grounds.
It's been a while since I've done a deep dive on background check requirements as they tend to vary by type of firearm but you cannot buy any firearm from a dealer without a background check. Honestly I think this is the one gun control advocates could make the most ground on, and the one that people can most reasonably disagree on. Quick AI math tells me that 32 states allow the purchase of a rifle from a private individual without a background check, which covers about 48% of the US population.
[0] https://x.com/GIFFORDS_org/status/1953570096443510896 claims nearly 1,000 people die from gun violence in Colorado in a year when the average is less than 300 and it's never been more than the low 400's - in fact numbers have only drastically increased as Colorado has passed more and more restrictive gun laws
> Where does this idea come from?
Anti-gun propaganda.
Anti-gunners first started practicing lawfare against companies involved in the gun industry by suing them for crimes committed using products the companies were involved with, even though this is a ridiculous idea never applied to any other type of product. They do it because, even when the lawsuits are thrown out eventually, they are still very expensive to defend and most companies in the industry don't have particularly deep pockets.
Gun-rights advocates got laws passed in a number of jurisdictions clarifying that gun manufacturers are only liable for genuine flaws in their products. This has largely squelched these types of nuisance lawsuits.
Anti-gun activists don't like that, so they frequently spread false information that such laws prevent manufacturers from being liable for genuine flaws in their products. Despite such false claims, no law ever passed or proposed actually does this, and no law in this area has ever been repealed due to actually blocking liability for genuine flaws.
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What law does this?
All that I can find are laws limiting liability for use of a properly functioning weapon, not against defects.
Keep in mind, too, that the US Army does NOT want this FMECA document released. From the article that is cited the US Army's project manager & legal counsel gave this response to help Sig justify keeping the document sealed: > The Army position would be to oppose the distribution to the public of the > FMECA document as it potentially reveals critical information about the > handgun (design, reliability, performance, etc.).
As others have said, this is simply false. The shield is against liability for misuse--or do you think people should be able to sue Ford for making a car a drunk can drive?
Furthermore, look at what caused it: the gun grabbers were planning to bury the gun makers in a flood of lawsuits that would overwhelm them regardless of whether they were actually wrong.
When the plaintiff is the US Armed Forces, does this still hold? Surely the contract with an arm of the military doesn't have the same protections?
They can freeze funds and cancel future contracts, which should be enough pressure. What's wild to me is the military version was not even remotely safer.
100% the families of those affected by Sigs goof ups should sue.
The NRA has been insidious since its coup back in the day and then its subsequent commandeering by the right wing as a propaganda tool: at one point, there was a popular pistol type (I don’t recall the make/model) that was really good at accidentally discharging and the NRA helped not only to shield the manufacturer from liability, but also to keep the guns in circulation because there was a specific group of people (cough black cough) who disproportionately favored this gun due to iirc low price point. It was pretty obviously a case of “well hey, if these guns are accidentally firing and killing _black folk_ then it’s not really an issue”
This is not true.
There's possibly 4 million of these guns on the street. Sig should do a massive recall.
Even an arms manufacturer with a historic reputation for quality is vulnerable to the phenomena of Enshittification.
In this case, the historic reputation for quality is entirely disconnected from the company. SIG USA shares a brand with the German and Swiss companies with the same name, but it is not the same company that made the P226
All 3 entities - the German, Swiss, and US entities are owned by a German holding company L&O Holdings, but yes, the basis of the 226 was designed by the original Swiss entity.
“Enshitification” refers to pivoting from selling a product to selling the audience that bought the product. For instance, Windows putting ads in the start menu.
As awful as this Sig Sauer fiasco is, it doesn’t seem to be a result of a pivot to indirect monetization.
This is not what enshittification means. Facebook enshittified itself without ever having sold a product to its users. They were selling their users' personal data before they ever became enshittified.
Enshittification is about obtaining, then abusing platform semi-monopoly power to extract more money from your users and your customers by making your product worse.
> Enshittification is about obtaining, then abusing platform semi-monopoly power to extract more money from your users and your customers by making your product worse.
Yeah, this is how I meant it.
In the case of Sig, it was probably cost-cutting, product management by committee, corner-cutting due to tight business reqs, or some combo of the above.
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Few people would be surprised if a car drove forward when on, in gear, and the gas pedal is depressed.
When a specific make/model has a nasty habit of driving through the sides of garages when off and no one is touching them, and eventually runs someone over and kills them? People get concerned.
Especially when the manufacturer knew this could (and was!) happening and insisted on gaslighting everyone about it for years.
That cars can be used to run people over (and sometimes are even designed to do so effectively!) doesn’t change that. Especially since most miles driven never run anyone over at all.
I find the car = gun analogy so tired. A car's purpose is to transport, and sometimes it accidentally kills. A gun's purpose is to kill. People always say "it's a tool"... yeah, to kill. Anytime you have a device like that, unexpected killings can happen. People shoot themselves and other people accidentally all the time; not because it was not "used as intended", but because it's a killing device.
I find this argument tired and poorly thought out. As a hunter there are many times kill is my goal. I also use my guns for target practice where kill is not the goal. Just because a gun's purpose is to kill does not mean it has to kill anything, or that car drivers should get off for their killing. A death is a death, it needs to be intentional killing only with either a gun or a car.
Most gun owners are very aware of how deadly their tool is, and are careful with it. Most car owners do not put anywhere near the safety thought into how they drive (it is rare to see someone maintain a 3 second following distance even though that along could save a lot of lives)
The P320 is a service pistol used by various US military branches, police forces and other people with an obvious need to carry a gun. The design is unsafe compared to other designs. People who's job requires carrying a gun are made less safe by this pistol. How would "guns are made to kill people, so who cares" justify an unsafe design?
Devices are supposed to work as intended, implied is WHEN intended. If you have a circular saw that randomly cuts when not asked, is a mature response "oh no our cutty thing cuts" ?
That is why your post was flagged. A snarky, snide response like your detracts from meaningful discussion.
> Devices are supposed to work as intended, implied is WHEN intended. If you have a circular saw that randomly cuts when not asked, is a mature response "oh no our cutty thing cuts" ?
Yes, always assume that you will get cut and treat it as such.
> That is why your post was flagged.
I don't care. I knew it was gonna get downvoted to hell. I'm not trolling, I'm trying to point out that people shouldn't be surprised when something like this happens. That's why you're "never supposed to point a gun at something you don't want to shoot", right? The logic there is that it could always go off unintentionally. In this case, it goes off unintentionally a little more often.
> That's why you're "never supposed to point a gun at something you don't want to shoot", right? The logic there is that it could always go off unintentionally.
I'm going to take you at your word that you're not trolling and treat this as a legitimate good faith question/argument.
The logic of that is emphatically not that guns randomly go off on their own so you do that for safety. They're not supposed to (obviously), and if you're looking at modern firearms it really only happens due to damage or massive design flaws (which would cover the 320).
The logic is that it's a Swiss cheese threat model that is designed to reduce the odds of a negligent discharge and reduce the damage should one happen (which in 99.99999% of cases is someone pulling the trigger unintentionally).
1. Treat all guns as though they are loaded - if you're ever handling a gun, the first thing you're supposed to do is visually and physically check the chamber and the magazine well that there is no magazine and an empty chamber.
2. Don't point the firearm at anything you don't want to destroy - even immediately after checking a firearm if you flag someone with it a lot of gun stores will kick you out. Even with no magazine and the slide locked back it's incredibly poor form to point it anywhere close to another person.
3. Be sure of your target and what's behind it - pretty self-explanatory and a borderline repeat of #2. In a self-defense type of scenario this also means "don't shoot at unidentified things."
4. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot - the only purpose of the trigger is to send a round downrange so there's zero reason to be messing with the trigger otherwise (one notable exception not really worth discussing here).
So it's really not "don't point the firearm at stuff you don't want to shoot" because guns occasionally go off on their own, magically, it's really "people make mistakes, the Swiss cheese model of accident causation is real, and this is one more thing to mitigate the impact of accidents when they inevitably happen."
All of those rules exist in order to prevent an unintended killing. They would not be necessary without a machine designed for killing. I don't know why this is so complicated. No gun present, no gunshot. Gun present, possible gunshot.
I'm not trolling. You can have all the "safety" protocols you want, but at the end of the day it still won't stop every unintended killing due to a killing machine.
Don't pretend. You are trolling.
The same thing can be said for circular saw. The intention is the important aspect regardless of the purpose of the device.
Stop being coy and immature.
I agree with you.
The problem is people use these objective facts (none of which are in dispute so far as I know) to make completely asinine arguments like "just make some guns illegal" or "just take away everyone's guns." So that makes it very difficult to have level-headed discussions.
The problem in that case is that it kills unintentionally when it's used in a way that shouldn't end up in a discharge at all.
If you put your gun in your pants pocket and shoot your balls while running around it's on you, if you safely put your gun in a safe holster and it shoots your balls while your walking it's the gun's problem.
A nuke is a killing device, we never made one go boom unintentionally despite abusing some of them way past what's reasonable.
A car's primary purpose isn't to kill or maim humans. If you think handguns are made for anything else then you're fooling yourself.
So much for the "guns don't shoot themselves!!" argument you occasionally hear from gun nuts. Yes they can and do shoot themselves!
Yes, this specific gun with this specific design issue that doesn't exist in any other firearm, and you now can't sell for more than $100 if you can sell it at all, and is banned by almost every professional shooting sports organization, and is banned by more ranges than its not can shoot by itself in very specific circumstances.
As a self-described gun nut, thought I'd make it a little more accurate :)
And sold by a company that has lost credibility with most "gun nuts" as a result of this whole years-long (now lethal) ordeal. Anti-2Aers think that we're all defending Sig for this behaviour. We're not.
At this point the only people defending Sig are people getting paid by Sig, or people trying to get paid by Sig.
Arguing with such a politically loaded sentence is probably a waste of time. BUT that's obviously not the intention of the quote. Actual malfunction induced firing is the exception, and its still a good saying to help people try and be safe/mindful. Not to mention even in that case there's still some movement or action leading to it nobody is saying that the sigs will just spontaneously fire while left sitting on a table.
I suppose out of context it seems out of nowhere, but if you follow some of these influencers they act like it is literally impossible for anything bad to happen with guns around.
I enjoy shooting myself (don't really do it frequently but I have a number of times at ranges) but I feel like there are a lot of people who do not take gun ownership seriously.
I also think there are a lot of people who dont take driving a car seriously enough so it isn't exclusive to guns...