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A Thoughtful & Nuanced Take on SIG's P320 Nightmare (Audio Only)
🕑 Added 2025-05-13 16:31:17 +0000 UTCHere's the video I did 2 years ago on this topic. I stand by my conclusions in that video, but with the caveat that it assumes the parts are all made to designed spec (I didn't think I would have to specify that...):
So which camp am I in? "I found a way to stick it to a big company and now that's my entire personality" or "Look at these morons, SIG makes a flawless pistol!". Neither, so I'm sure I will take flak from both of them (hence the flak jacket).
It sure does seem like there is something going on with P320s, but it's proving very difficult to figure out exactly what it the cause. Usually when I talk about a phenomenon like this I do so with the benefit of a few decades or centuries of hindsight and research, and I can explain things like how Springfield used receiver color to dictate 1903 heat treat, or how the CZ52 was only supposed to be a temporary service pistol.
One thing that I think really contributed to SIG's problem here is the three-fold set of issues with the P320. First was the drop safety flaw, which they did fix. Then the number of discharges caused by foreign objects in holsters or just by negligence - issues that I think are significantly exacerbated by the short, light trigger in the 320 and its lack of trigger dingus safety. Then third came the appearance of truly uncommanded discharges. In the public perception, I think these issues all blend together, making each individual issue seem more common than it probably really is.
Would a company hide and deny a problem that they found while quietly fixing internal processes to fix it? Yeah, of course they would. Does anyone really think they wouldn't? Is that the case here with the P320? I really don't know...but I look forward to following up with a definitive explanation video in 2035.
Comments
Forgotten Weapons
No. The CA roster is not actually a safety initiative; it's a way to prevent handguns from being sold in CA by making the process prohibitively expensive for companies.
Jason Dusek
Is there any particular reason to believe that P320s on the California Safe Handgun Roster have design differences that make them safer than other P320s? It's interesting to think about the possibility that a regulatory mechanism like that failed to catch the most well known and notorious pistol safety failure of a generation.
Adam Schindler
I love SiGs, and I've only ever carried them. That said, all of my carry guns until I recently got a P365 were DA/SA guns. The very first thing that I did on the P365 was to add a Tyrant "poor man's Glock" trigger, which works surprisingly well. It's more finicky than a Glock trigger, and the P365 (but NOT the P320 trigger) is worse than a Glock trigger, but the gun is still surprisingly accurate. I will point out that in USPSA, holstering a single action pistol with the hammer back and the chamber loaded is an automatic safety DQ. An STI 2011 trigger and a rack grade M17 trigger aren't the same, but when the standard is "can a plausible piece of debris in the holster pull the trigger?", they are a LOT more similar than the double action pull of an M9 or even the SAS trigger on a Glock. My guess is that with the aid of omniscience, "something other than a human finger pulled the trigger" would be found to be responsible for far more NDs than a flaw in the mechanical safety systems; I'm a big fan of "start with the largest/most common problem/cause and work your way down the list".
Jack Wakeland
Thanks for this NON-POLEMICAL manufacturing engineering discussion…. …a screengrab from a 2017 armorer’s manual for the P320, posted by “sigfreund” at SIGforum.com on Nov 14, 2020 shows a safety lock with a three-dimensional shape that IS NOT characteristic of a sheet metal stamping. The old safety lock may have been a MIM part or a forged part. The new one is sheet metal.
