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.
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.
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...
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...
> In that statement, the company also blamed the “anti-gun mob” for attacks on the P320.
lol, no words left to describe this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> multiple ways the pistol could fire without an intentional trigger pull
That doesn't sound ideal.
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.
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.
Scary to think that I almost bought a P320 before I decided against it for a different reason.
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.
Well that settles it… I’m never buying a Sig Sauer
> 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.
> 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"? :)
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]
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[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?
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!
There's possibly 4 million of these guns on the street. Sig should do a massive recall.
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.
According to a court exhibit, Sig Sauer identified several deadly risks with its P320 pistols as early as 2017.
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.
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.
Even an arms manufacturer with a historic reputation for quality is vulnerable to the phenomena of Enshittification.
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So much for the "guns don't shoot themselves!!" argument you occasionally hear from gun nuts. Yes they can and do shoot themselves!
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".