Independent testing at the local, state and federal level acknowledge you can fire a P320 without pulling the trigger. Making sure the gun only fires when the trigger is pulled is requirement #1, #2 and #3 for any gun.
If this isn't satisfied you haven't made a gun, you've made a really shitty grenade.
There's a decent chance that the handgun our men and women are issued is a danger. When the M16 had problems early in Vietnam there was an investigation and they found out it was a powder issue in the cartridges. No (good) reason that there's not something similar for this issue here.
And Sig can dig their heels in all they want, but when you've got ranges banning P320s and they're in the bargain bin at the local gun shop, well, the market has spoken. You can't unring that bell. Stop production of the P320, fire the executives, and do what it takes to repair this issue.
- Sig has known about it for years[1]
- A company recently filed a patent for a fix[2] and they offered Sig the rights to it before filing, but Sig refused.
- The Air Force has cleared the 320 for use[3]. In my pessimistic opinion, they probably determined the cost to procure new weapons would exceed the cost to replace lost airmen.
[1] https://smokinggun.org/court-records-reveal-sig-sauer-knew-o...
[2] https://www.wearethemighty.com/military-news/patent-says-the...
[3] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/08/25/m18s-cleared-...
In a Friday statement, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson said that the unidentified arrested person is accused of making a false official statement, obstruction of justice and involuntary manslaughter.
In this case, the whole "it want off by itself" claim was a lie.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2025/08/08...
I think we need to await the facts of the case and the judgement. The only public information I've seen strikes me as unusual.
The accused airman is being charged with involuntary manslaughter, which coupled with the extensive issues with the P320 brings up more questions than it answers.
I could come up with my own conjecture based on that information, but there's enough people doing that already.
The fact remains that the P320 malfunctions. There's been countless documented cases, and numerous recorded demonstrations of the issue on YouTube and elsewhere.
It can be both Sig and this Airman’s fault at the same time.
In case anyone else is interested:
UCMJ Article 119 (Manslaughter): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/919
UCML Article 118 (Murder): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/918
But IANAL, and to the extent I pay attention to the law, that kind of basic criminal law isn't it.
Maybe the issue is that the 320 is too close to a competition trigger, and it isn't appropriate for a duty gun. But the gun has been under a microscope for years now, and no one has shown a design defect that causes the gun to fire by itself.
A hair trigger is unsuitable for combat use because of the "errybody be muzzle sweeping errybody up in here" nature of combat.
Those two uses are 99.99% of what the air force needs its pistols to do.
They could give it better tolerances so it has a "good trigger" without "hair trigger" but that will cost a lot of money. Or they could give it an absurd trigger pull like duty guns had in the "good old days" but that will cost just as much money for equivalent results because you'll need to train the force more to get the same accuracy of fire.
Additionally, with the fairly sloppy nature of these guns and the fundamental nature of how handguns work, it's not unforeseeable that they do get clapped out to the point of just going off if you bump the slide right as they age since they're so close to that as is.
Considering how many people need to be trained/equipped and how often the air force fires sidearms in "real" situations both of these solutions are way, way, way more expensive than a few bodies.
2: The trigger is what it is, the military and police departments chose it for what was.
I agree, the police in particular, should use a gun that takes more effort to fire. But don't blame Sig for this, it isn't a design flaw.
There are also manufacturing issues with intermingling parts with different geometries intended for different calibers and building guns with the wrong parts, such as installing a 10mm Auto/.45 ACP takedown safety level in a 9mm gun, or installing a metal injection molded firing pin safety that's out of spec, worn, or contributes to tolerance stacking in such a way that the gun becomes unsafe.
The range video where they are standing on the line was allegedly a modified gun with non-Sig upper and trigger.
A gun in a holster can fire when it is moved and the holster is poorly fit, incorrectly configured, or there anything caught in it like tail of a shirt, drawstring. Also, many police have a flashlight on their pistol, which opens up space quite a bit making it easier for things to get caught inside.
That's the Air Force's accusation.
This might be true, but nowhere in the article you posted does it say that.
As is classifying all the documents about the pistol and its issues.
There is nothing even remotely credibly related to national security about the P320 or issues related to it.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the military has a very long history of covering up issues with corruptly procured weapons.
Just one particularly notorious example of many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Iowa_turret_explosion
> The first investigation into the explosion, conducted by the U.S. Navy, concluded that one of the gun turret crew members, Clayton Hartwig, who died in the explosion, had deliberately caused it. During the investigation, numerous leaks to the media, later attributed to U.S. Navy officers and investigators, implied that Hartwig and another sailor, Kendall Truitt, had engaged in a romantic relationship and that Hartwig had caused the explosion after their relationship had soured. However, in its report, the U.S. Navy concluded that the evidence did not show that Hartwig was homosexual but that he was suicidal and had caused the explosion with either an electronic or chemical detonator.
Cynically, there's a very good reason they haven't. Embarrassment, money, entitlement... lots of reasons, actually.
Personally my money's on corruption but I have no proof.
Sig also won contracts for suppressors, optics, and probably more I'm unaware of or can't remember. Unit cost of the M7 is several times higher than the M4, it's heavier, has more recoil, carries less ammo, and the cartridge it fires is still stopped by commonly available body armor that's manufactured today.
Corruption is obvious in my mind, it's shocking Congress seems either oblivious or so complacent.
The requirements may be goofy, but that's a requirements problem and not a Sig problem.
Hammer fired guns are capable of doing this safely because they have a sear geometry that requires moving the hammer back against spring pressure with trigger input a very short distance before the hammer drops. Along with a functioning sear block in case the hammer slips off the sear without trigger input, this makes them very safe.
Basically every other striker fired gun on the market uses a semi-cocked striker with a trigger widget and sear block, which is a copy of Glock's design, and it's quite safe.
Sig deviated from this design without fully proving it out. Their guns don't have trigger widgets, which allows the trigger to move under momentum when dropped, causing repeatable firings. The fully cocked striker design leads to a shorter, crisper pull, but a sear slip leads to uncommanded firings, unlike a semi-cocked design, which doesn't have enough energy to fire a primer.
Combine this with poor control of manufacturing, intermingling of parts designed and intended for different calibers, as well as factories in the US and India with varying levels of quality control and poor spec for parts to begin with (metal injection molding for fire control parts), and safety critical systems like the sear block have been shown to not be 100% reliable. It's a system of cascading failures resulting in a firearm that's unsafe to carry loaded.
I’ve owned rifles that had safeties that made it impossible to pull the trigger. Don’t these?
Fully cocked strikers are ready to ignite a primer if the striker drops. I don't know of another design like Sig's that has a fully cocked striker, which is not to say there isn't one, or that they're all unsafe.
The P320 in particular suffers from compromises shoehorning a fire control unit designed for one gun into another.
Combined with poor manufacturing techniques, tolerance stacking, part mixing, and poor QA, the striker block, which is the last safety intended to block the striker without an explicit trigger pull, can become ineffective.
To answer your question, there's no mechanical reason a handgun cannot be designed an manufactured to not fire without explicit mechanical input from the user. Indeed almost every commercially produced handgun on the market fits this requirement. A combination of failures on Sig's part has allowed this to happen.
But some of the types of safeties increase the change you won’t have it on (because time to disengage the safety is too long/complicated) or that they will introduce additional failure modes.
For some missions, “unsafe” is better than “too safe” - think one step from gun drawn, finger on the trigger.
This is one of the reasons Glocks are so popular, as the trigger safety is really “easy” to disengage as it’s the same as the mechanism you use to fire.
But it doesn’t protect YOU from being a dumbass. Safeties that do that are dangerous in another way.
See: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/07/05/glock-says-be...
I don't blame them for playing it safe. I've personally had to help Bay Area HR types understand that looking at "weapons" sites by itself was probably okay when the company we worked for had thousands of employees across California and at least some percentage of them hunted, went target shooting, etc.
https://www.pewpewtactical.com/m16-vietnam-failure/
(I own an ar15 and an ak47 and it is like comparing Microsoft’s MFC to a shell script. The former is all bloat and high tolerances and the latter gets the job done with fewer moving parts.)
The biggest difference is about 20 years of industrial development (moving from stamped/milled steel to aluminum)
SIG Switzerland, the original who mainly services the Swiss government and domestic market. They created the original P210, SG 550 series, etc
SIG Sauer Germany, the now-defunct company SIG Switzerland created when it bought German firearms company JP Sauer and Sons in order to develop, market, and sell firearms in a legally easier jurisdiction. They are most famous for the P220 series of handguns.
SIG Sauer USA, the New Hampshire based company that was initially created to make importing easier that is now by far the largest and most well known SIG. They created the P250, P320, P365, SG556, MCX series, etc. They are very well
Overall, SIG Switzerland and Germany have very good reputations for making high quality products (Sig Sauer Germany almost won the competition with the P226 to become the M9, they lost because they were more expensive than the Beretta 92, very similar to what happened between Glock and Sig Sauer USA for the M17...), SIG USA on the other hand does not.
I do agree with your assessment of quality between the companies, though.
I could see the argument in the early 1900's, but today that's absolutely ridiculous on its face.
The only "national security issue" is that it's embarrassing.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOMQOtOQoPk
Handgun design doesn't really get any worse than that.
The P320 has had many reported issues but having it go off when you pull the trigger is actually intended behavior.
More information available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1KoSBcn2bY
> "The shear amount of movement in the trigger it takes on the Glock PLUS the fact the trigger safety has to depressed lends it self to make this scenario extremely extremely unlikely to happen from jostling. Which is the exact opposite for the 320. Tiny amount of movement needed, way more slop in the gun as a whole and no trigger safety all lends itself to be way more likely to happen from jostling. Thats the argument."
The above claim is most likely true: it is easy to pull the trigger accidentally on the Sig. But that isn't the argument. People are claiming it will fire uncommanded.
The video is misleading because he is partially pulling the trigger, which deactivates the internal safety mechanisms.
It is the clickbait equivalent of a video claiming Rust is not memory safe, that starts by showing a Rust program running and causing a BSOD. Then deep in the video, what they show is he wrote a bunch of explicit unsafe code.
While true that it is misleading, i still think it's fundamentally correct. You do not expect your firearm to discharge if someone bumps you while the trigger has the slack taken out.
This holds true on basically every modern handgun that has such a mechanism (striker or hammer-fired).
The Sig P320 probably has more issues than the originally discovered drop-safety deficiencies, and Sig US has been very quick to deny-deny-deny. But firing when you pull the trigger is not an issue.
The glock that I used to compete regularly with basically felt like a double action revolver.
That is fairly average across the market for other handguns.
Unless you were shooting a Glock with one of the infamous NYPD 12lb triggers…
This is not a fair and accurate phrasing of the problem. Triggers have a breakpoint in the pull at which you expect them to fire. Discharging by touching the slide, even while the trigger is depressed, is not expected or acceptable.
This is not unique to the P320, Sig, or even striker-fired handguns in general. This could just as easily apply to a CZ-75B. There is no magic that keeps the striker from dropping until the shooter has their heart set on discharging a round.
There is a reason that rule #3 of firearm safety is to not put your finger on the trigger until you're ready to shoot
What do you want to bet this is a variant of some sort of light pressure against the trigger at some point in the past (including even just heavy movement!) causing a stuck trigger, plus these other issues, resulting in an uncommanded discharge ‘randomly’?
The FBI analysis showed truly terrible wear characteristics and quality control for the fire control parts which can’t be helping.
If you put a few thousand rounds through either it will generate slide and frame rail wear. After this, either would have slightly more "slop" between the frame and the slide.
The glock trigger-dingus can make unintended discharges less likely because it requires an object to go into the trigger guard. But the WyomingGunProject video shows someone putting something in the trigger guard, pulling the trigger past the wall with sympathetic movement, then firing the gun. Not the result of "jostling".
This isn't to say there aren't P320's that couldn't fire uncommanded but the WyomingGunProject video is not the proverbial "smoking gun". The exact cause is, at this time, not publicly known.
Trying to equipment-ify your way out of a training problem resulted in NYPD equipping its pistols with a trigger so heavy that their already-easy qualification course became a problem for many recruits. Their hit percentage in actual shootings is awful, and that ~12 pound NYPD-spec trigger didn't help it any. They finally saw the error of their ways after making their officers suffer needlessly for years.
https://www.police1.com/patrol-issues/articles/nypd-should-i...
It depends. This is something the program office would consider as part of its acquisition strategy, and then this would be part of the competitive bid process and contract negotiations.
There is such a thing as Government Purpose Rights (GPR) that might, for example, allow the government to subcontract with third parties for replacement parts which would enable competition to keep costs down. This is really important because most of the costs in an acquisition come from the long tail of sustainment, not the initial purchase.
For something like the M17/M18, the Army wouldn’t necessarily want or need to buy the complete intellectual property behind the weapon. What they care about is having enough rights to ensure lifecycle support, competition for parts or sustainment contracts, etc. Your example of a company going out of business is a perfect example of where GPR would be relevant.
Edit: apparently not full auto, man we should have just let Glock take the contract when they started manufacturing in the US instead of Sig, their track record is much more sound.
The Swiss Sig's have a sterling reputation. The P226 that entered the XM9 trials (against the Beretta 92) was imported from Switzerland by SAKO.
The US company didn't really start manufacturing until the 90s with the P229 and the Sig Pro series (where they were only tasked with making the plastic frames, not the more intricate lock work).
Consumers can buy a civilian version of the M17 that's really difficult to distinguish from the Army's version (the safety's a different color, black instead of brown, or something like that).
One of the stated requirements for the updated pistol was a thumb-operated external safety. Glock's never been willing to manufacture a pistol with that feature, so they effectively excluded themselves from the competition.
There are many that have adopted machine pistols for various uses, particularly special forces, VIP protection, and for the roles currently filled by PDWs, which means that common troops sometimes were issued them.
The Glock 18 is a selective-fire variant of the Glock 17, developed at the request of the Austrian counter-terrorist unit EKO Cobra, and as a way to internally test Glock components under high strain conditions.
Additionally, the very long history of machine pistols would indicate the form-factor is a poor fit for the application of any full-auto fire.
This is the primary reason that personal defense weapons (PDWs) were developed in the first place.
someguydave is correct. Compact automatic weapons make sense for highly trained body guards protecting VIPs when discretion is considered important.
What is NOT a meme, and is useful, but counts as fully automatic, is three or five round burst mode.
Chainguns are a type of autocannon. Heavy, light and general purpose machine guns, like the M2 Browning, M249 SAW, Maxim, Been Gun, MG3, etc... none of these are chain guns. They aren't even all belt fed, which I guess is what you meant to say because I think that's the videogame midwit lingo. They are nonetheless universally accepted as being very valuable in combat.
Revoke contracts, investigate the leadership who accepted the contract, and hold Sig criminally liable given they have internal documents from years ago acknowledging the fact.
The recent week long pause in the Air Force seems like some brass made a decision that Sig or DoD forced them to walk back.
though they should if we weren’t living in a simulation. They’re all culpable.
Assuming that Sig Sauer management is reasonable, we can assume that one or more of these are true:
* The known rate of failure B is determined to be low. Consider that not every discharge would be from a design flaw. Many cases can be assumed or proven to be user negligence.
* They assume that they can keep the court settlement costs, C, to a low value by never admitting fault and hoping that no one else can convincingly demonstrate a poor design. Many cases result in no injury or non-lethal injury, which naturally reduces C.
* The number of guns produced, A, is quite large, so the cost of the recall is also quite large.
* The unit cost of the recall (X/A) is much higher than known externally. This is my preferred theory (outside of corporate incompetence & malice). It could be the case that the design has an issue with tolerance stacking AND there is no single dimension of replacement part that resolves the issue. You could imagine that the replacement part needs to take up negative tolerance by being slightly larger, and positive tolerance by being slightly smaller. Without carefully measuring each unit (which is expensive), you can't determine which part to use. Or it could be that the part that would need to be replaced is a substantial part of the weapon's cost, e.g. the slide or the frame.
Maybe a decade from now this becomes a semi-obscure bit of gun lore and SIG US more or less recovers.
But right now?
If you’re in the market for a handgun, or any gun for that matter, are you going to touch SIG US’s stuff? Maybe, but there are customers who might just say that they don’t want to take that chance and go with Glock or whoever else. Do those customers come back? Why doesn’t this get brought up at every single bid for a contract SIG US makes from now on?
It’s possible that they’re still making the right EV call of course, but the medium-term hit they’re taking from a flaw like this that you don’t make right has to be massive.
There was a recent huge thread on HN around the Air Force incident, we now know the guy was playing with the gun, shot and killed someone, then lied about it going off sitting on the table.
If there was some defect that Sig could fix via recall, they would be stupid not to recall. Maybe there is just nothing to fix, and they aren’t stupid.
https://www.sigsauer.com/blog/safety-recall-notice-sig-sauer...
They would have been in a better spot today to defend the P320 if they had made it a mandatory recall, so they probably should have done it.
I wouldn't be surprised if gun companies get a constant stream of fake complaints.
I didn't have access to guns when I was a 17-year-old, but if I had I'd certainly have tried twirling them like a movie cowboy. And if I accidentally shot myself while doing that, I certainly wouldn't tell my parents what I was doing at the time, that would make me look like a total dumbass, completely irresponsible. I'd say it went off while I was putting it into my holster, or something.
Then my parents would have complained to the gunmaker, repeating my cover story, and the gunmaker would find it impossible to reproduce or fix.
Perhaps gunmakers don't always realise when they're getting legitimate complaints, because they get so many 'creative' complaints?
Ruger had one for the SR22 not too long ago. It's a .22 handgun that is more-or-less a range toy. A cool range toy, but a range toy. There was some sort of dead trigger problem that could pose a safety issue. Did Ruger deny it at every turn? No, they put out a notice and offered to fix the firearm free of charge.
Now compare that with how Sig's handled the P320, which is a service pistol and used daily in life-or-death situations.
If you make new-design firearms in any real volume, you will find yourself issuing recalls. Batches of parts get out of spec, things wear out, and you get reports that it can become dangerous. The good gunmakers stand behind their product.