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."
"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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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. )
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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:
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.
Readit News
Though millions of guns x .0001%...well...
https://smokinggun.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/gov.uscour...
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.
[0] - https://smokinggun.org/about/
[1] - https://www.everytown.org/about-everytown/history/
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."
https://www.thetrace.org/2016/08/atf-non-searchable-database...
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 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.
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?"
Whether that's a correct critique or not, I don't know, but your reply is certainly misunderstanding their comment.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L17Mq7XxtlE
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'm used to the kind of engineering where the goal is not to kill people I guess...
And even by Sig themselves in other models. It seems to be a problem specific to the P320 / M17.
> 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.).
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.
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...
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.
0: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/m16-rifle-viet...
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA80
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
*awkward silence*
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.
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.
Curious, what's this referring to?
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.
https://practicalshootinginsights.com/a-year-before-the-army...
"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.
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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