Court records reveal Sig Sauer knew of pistol risks for years

https://smokinggun.org/court-records-reveal-sig-sauer-knew-of-pistol-risks-for-years/

by eoskx • 11 months ago

193 209 11 months ago

smokinggun.org

eoskx7• 11 months ago

According to a court exhibit, Sig Sauer identified several deadly risks with its P320 pistols as early as 2017.

normie3000• 11 months ago

multiple ways the pistol could fire without an intentional trigger pull

That doesn't sound ideal.

andrepd• 11 months ago

Master of the understatement :)

Esophagus4• 11 months ago

Well that settles it… I’m never buying a Sig Sauer

CodingJeebus• 11 months ago

Certainly not the first time something like this happened. During Vietnam, the US Army sent soldiers into combat with the M16 knowing that it had major issues that often caused it to jam. We’ll never know exactly people were killed by such a bad decision, but it quickly became infamous early in the war.[0]

0: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/m16-rifle-viet...

giantg26• 11 months ago

And the Berretta slide failures. And many similar issues for all kinds of things.

tylerflick• 11 months ago

I was going to mention this! I was on a range and watched a slide completely break in half after firing. The Beretta’s where terrible.

gnfargbl• 11 months ago

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

KaiserPro• 11 months ago

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. )

linksnapzz• 11 months ago

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.

XorNot2• 11 months ago

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.

jandrewrogers2• 11 months ago

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.

shepardrtc• 11 months ago

Note that not only has Sig Sauer lied about this and attempted to gaslight people[1], they have also sued organizations to force them to continue using the pistol after they chose to discontinue use due to the dangers[2]

----

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DG6RkWCpkdw/#

[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/gunmaker-sues-washingtons-p...

thorncorona• 11 months ago

[flagged]

joyeuse67013• 11 months ago

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”

WillPostForFood5• 11 months ago

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”.

bayindirh3• 11 months ago

Move briskly and kill people?

That's a deadly twist to "move fast and break things" motto.

Seriously, Sig Sauer. You are making weapons, not disposable pens, and the world leading disposable pen company literally uses "standards x 1.5" as their baseline.

eoskx7• 11 months ago

There's another article that is cited where Sig with someone else was apparently developing the fixes to resolve these issues years before the gun was actually tested with the US Army, but didn't deploy the fixes until they were pressured:

https://practicalshootinginsights.com/a-year-before-the-army...

giantg26• 11 months ago

And those "fixes" didn't fully resolve the issues.

kotaKat• 11 months ago

Sig Sauer: “You take some of the shots you don’t make”

imglorp• 11 months ago

world leading disposable pen company literally uses "standards x 1.5" as their baseline

Curious, what's this referring to?

bayindirh3• 11 months ago

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.

eoskx7• 11 months ago

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...

codegeek• 11 months ago

Scary to think that I almost bought a P320 before I decided against it for a different reason.

dayjah3• 11 months ago

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.

pc8612• 11 months ago

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.

seanw4443• 11 months ago

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.

pc8612• 11 months ago

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.

giantg26• 11 months ago

While I agree with the title of the article, some of the contents seem a little over the top in the way they present them. We would need to see the document to know how bad it really is. Many of the failure modes could be user dependent for lack of training (ie finger in trigger guard when holstering). They also don't say which failure modes were fixed and what remained. That said, all you need is one valid failure mode to be dangerous.

"Sig Sauer also stated that the manual safeties on M17 and M18 pistols would resolve some of the issues,"

This would only be the training dependent ones. Mechanically, the safety only blocks the trigger and does nothing to block the striker or sear.

Zak3• 11 months ago

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...

poleguy• 11 months ago

This article makes me wonder about comparative analysis against other models and brands. It is good Sig Sauer produced a failure mode analysis. Where are the competitive analysis documents?

It also makes me wonder if the reason it can't fix some of these issues is because it is working around patent issues.

Pure speculation.

eoskx7• 11 months ago

It appears based on some other court documents that Sig with the P320 intentionally excluded a trigger tab safety based on marketing decisions to be competitive, which every other striker-fired handgun has included. That along with some other issues appears to be the basis for where the P320 design went wrong.

lazide11• 11 months ago

The reason they can’t fix these issues is someone in leadership likely literally has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and is quite literally incapable of acknowledging a mistake or problem. To the point they’ll inevitably torpedo the company rather than take any ownership or responsibility.

If the Board is smart, they’ll fire the person before it gets to that point - but if they were smart, they probably wouldn’t have hired the type of person to get them into this mess in the first place.

gosub1002• 11 months ago

That's not really an Occam's Razor conclusion. I would say the reason is that multiple lawsuits were already filed, and to admit the gun was defective essentially means you lose all the suits overnight. At the time, they chose to ride it out because they didn't know how many of these guns were actually defective.

My guess is it was a perfect storm where the defect rate was low enough to escape their quality control but high enough (or perhaps delayed long enough, meaning it takes years for the defect to appear) to lead to a clear signal after the horse got out of the barn. Enough suits were filed that they perhaps risk bankruptcy if they lose all of them.

That's just my speculation, and seems to be more plausible than some side effect from mental illness.

cypherpunks01• 11 months ago

"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*

pc8612• 11 months ago

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?

andrewflnr6• 11 months ago

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.

dmoy4• 11 months ago

This article makes me wonder about comparative analysis against other models and brands. It is good Sig Sauer produced a failure mode analysis. Where are the competitive analysis documents?

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

yold__• 11 months ago

In a nutshell, the defect that causes the guns to fire when holstered occurs when there is a small amount of pressure on the trigger. If the slide (top part of the gun) is wiggled / nudged, it will fire. Also, the gun can fire when dropped. Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.

potato3732842• 11 months ago

Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.

And just not having hot dog down a hallway tolerances at the slide to frame interface.

The trigger stuff lives in the bottom half of the gun and the bang stuff lives in the top half and only goes bang depending upon the relative position of the trigger stuff. So allowing the top half and the bottom half to move around a ton is generally unwise unless you make accommodations elsewhere in the design so that you still have proper relative position regardless of where in the hallway the hotdog is.

alexpotato• 11 months ago

There are videos online showing that this also happens with Glocks (when the trigger is depressed to the wall) [0]

Really, any gun where the sear is in the grip and the part it connects to is in the frame could have the same issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaV32HarnRY

galangalalgol2• 11 months ago

So a classic sig double action or 1911 wouldn't be effected? He video says striker fired specifically. Cocked and locked I'm not sure how you would make this happen.

jabedude2• 11 months ago

This video does not show a Glock firing with a "small amount of pressure on the trigger", which is what the OP said the issue w/ the P320 is

bastawhiz2• 11 months ago

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.

bhickey• 11 months ago

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.

pclmulqdq4• 11 months ago

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.

oflannabhra3• 11 months ago

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

lazide11• 11 months ago

Also, they’ve had numerous issues with their triggers failing to reset correctly and/or otherwise misbehaving. That was the focus of the original ‘voluntary upgrade’.

That this giant mess of bad tolerances, sloppy change management, iffy manufacturing outsourcing, and a design which is sensitive to these issues it seems inevitable these kinds of random and hard to reproduce problems would occur. And the more they sold, the worse it would get.

Do that in something which literally can cause death and serious injury if it fails, in an environment where all your competitors designs don’t have these issues and hence users tend towards ‘round in the chamber’ and carrying them in all sorts of messy real world situations? Guaranteed disaster eventually.

Bad sig.

The brand was dead to me many years ago (extractor snapped in the middle of a course - seemed like bad metallurgy, or a bad design), but this is entirely another level of crazy.

joyeuse67013• 11 months ago

Agreed. One of the greater examples of brand destruction of the 21st century.

eoskx7• 11 months ago

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.).

Modified30192• 11 months ago

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.

throw0101a• 11 months ago

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.

sc68cal• 11 months ago

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...

evo_92• 11 months ago

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.

pc8612• 11 months ago

"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.

bradleyy• 11 months ago

You might not, but this is exactly how a pistol like this should be carried.

rpmisms• 11 months ago

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.

patrickmay• 11 months ago

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.

WillPostForFood5• 11 months ago

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.

conartist6• 11 months ago

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...

tehwebguy• 11 months ago

I wonder how many people died when police encounters were escalated to “shots fired” by their faulty Sig.

It’s one thing for a gun to go off and potentially hit someone but it’s another when the first round fired triggers 4 cops to empty a mag each.

SoftTalker• 11 months ago

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.

pc8612• 11 months ago

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.

subscribed• 11 months ago

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...

game_the0ry2• 11 months ago

Even an arms manufacturer with a historic reputation for quality is vulnerable to the phenomena of Enshittification.

jabedude2• 11 months ago

In this case, the historic reputation for quality is entirely disconnected from the company. SIG USA shares a brand with the German and Swiss companies with the same name, but it is not the same company that made the P226

eoskx7• 11 months ago

All 3 entities - the German, Swiss, and US entities are owned by a German holding company L&O Holdings, but yes, the basis of the 226 was designed by the original Swiss entity.

brookst• 11 months ago

“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.

dreamcompiler• 11 months ago

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.

jordanb• 11 months ago

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.

dayjah3• 11 months ago

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?

giancarlostoro• 11 months ago

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.

wl6• 11 months ago

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.

eoskx7• 11 months ago

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.).

Zak3• 11 months ago

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...

_ea1k• 11 months ago

What law does this?

All that I can find are laws limiting liability for use of a properly functioning weapon, not against defects.

uticus• 11 months ago

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.

jack_h• 11 months ago

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.

ufmace• 11 months ago

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.

phatskat• 11 months ago

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”

agensaequivocum5• 11 months ago

This is not true.

LorenPechtel6• 11 months ago

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.

bbminner• 11 months ago

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"? :)

barbazoo• 11 months ago

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?

flerchin• 11 months ago

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.

zhengyi13• 11 months ago

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.

pc8612• 11 months ago

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.

santiagobasulto• 11 months ago

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?

joyeuse67013• 11 months ago

Some guns, striker fired, do not have safeties as you may think of them.

oldpersonintx2• 11 months ago

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

seanw4443• 11 months ago

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.

Zak3• 11 months ago

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.

WillPostForFood5• 11 months ago

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.

TheJoeMan• 11 months ago

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".

roland353• 11 months ago

At least while I was at NASA, a high impact score (ie death) would still elevate total risk even if the likelihood was low.

alephnerd6• 11 months ago

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/

inglor_cz• 11 months ago

"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.

multjoy3• 11 months ago

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...

psunavy033• 11 months ago

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."

tptacek• 11 months ago

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.

anigbrowl• 11 months ago

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.

ajross2• 11 months ago

[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?"

dddgghhbbfblk• 11 months ago

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.

BobaFloutist• 11 months ago

"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"

dogleash• 11 months ago

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.

orochimaaru• 11 months ago

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?

phonon• 11 months ago

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...

roland353• 11 months ago

So much for the "guns don't shoot themselves!!" argument you occasionally hear from gun nuts. Yes they can and do shoot themselves!

pc8612• 11 months ago

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 :)

seanw4443• 11 months ago

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.

Nicook• 11 months ago

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.

roland353• 11 months ago

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...

danielvf• 11 months ago

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.

wl6• 11 months ago

The important bit is that the guns failed drop testing and then Sig Sauer updated the design to fix the issue.

lazide11• 11 months ago

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.

anonu• 11 months ago

There's possibly 4 million of these guns on the street. Sig should do a massive recall.

oflannabhra3• 11 months ago

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...

wonderwonder• 11 months ago

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.

runnr_az• 11 months ago

Those guns can probably hurt someone!

OptionOfT• 11 months ago

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.

0xffff2• 11 months ago

The M17 (military version of the the P320) _has_ a manual safety.

qball• 11 months ago

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".

more_corn• 11 months ago

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.

knallfrosch• 11 months ago

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.

Arturo525• 11 months ago

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.

Court records reveal Sig Sauer knew of pistol risks for years

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