Air Force unit suspends use of Sig Sauer pistol after shooting death of airman

Context can be helpful for laypeople

It’s crazy if you have good morals and care about your fellow man.

If you want to make boatloads of cash and don’t care about lives, you follow the rules and the same playbook as Remington did when their rifles suffered a similar self-firing phenomenon that killed customers.

Delay, deny, defend yourself and take in as much cash as possible until you are legally boxed in. Hope at that point your profits are greater than your penalties, such that they are just another cost of doing business.

What amazes me are the Sig Sauer fanatics I see online in the gun communities defending them endlessly as if they can do no harm.

I don't think that is crazy at all, our whole system incentivizes corporate behavior exactly like this.

From your tone I assume that you would expect Sig to come forward, analyze, discuss and hopefully solve these problems as soon as possible.

But that would be utterly stupid from their point of view. Public opinion cares very little about the details-- anytime you get associated with issues like this is simply bad for your brand/stockpric: downplaying, denying and gaslighting is absolutely the way to go here for the company.

IMO to fix this you would need to strongly increase personal liability specifically for misinformation and delays in cases like this, and we would need to reward good behavior (proactive fixes, honest communication).

But just look at the whole tetraethyl lead debacle: This cost at least a million years of human lifes (!!), after the lead industry denied known problems and purposefully obstructed/discredited critical researchers (e.g. R. Buyers and H. Needleman) for decades. I strongly believe that a number of decisionmakers should have ended up with a dead penalty or lifelone imprisonment, but there were ZERO consequences for anyone involved, and current rethoric around "deregulation" makes it obvious to me that zero lessons were learned.

I've spent my career working with great marketers and I don't think any single one of them would advocate for the approach that Sig Sauer took with that stupid "It Ends Today" campaign. In fact, I'm sure all of them would have recommended the exact opposite.

They should very quickly pivot to a "It [100% Safety] Starts Today" remedial campaign admitting there's a problem, following-up with full transparency about how they plan to reorient their organization to make the situation better, then providing frequent proof of progress towards the safety goal. There's a critical window for them to turn this from a crisis that might sink the US division of the company to one that serves as the basis for why they were compelled to adopt safety-first design processes for their guns.

This is their version of the [1982 Tylenol Crisis](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/tylenol-murders-1982) but they've really fumbled the ball so far.

The issue here is a question of whether the product is defective. The various legislation passed to protect firearm manufacturers against nuisance “defective product” lawsuits in the specific case where the product functioned as intended and was used illegally by a violent criminal, do not apply.

This is not a political issue. This is a discussion about whether a product is defective.

There's no computers nor chairs involved, however.

> Sig Sauer, Inc is an American company

It appears to be the American half of a German-owned transnational company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIG_Sauer

The German company and American company are clearly related, given the German company is alleged to have manufactured and shipped firearms to the American company with falsified end-user certificates, which the American company then resold to Colombia in violation of German law: https://www.nhpr.org/post/ceo-nh-gun-maker-facing-five-years...

> The reason manual safeties are going away is that for side arms, time matters A LOT. Gun fights are typically over within just a few seconds and the person who fires first has a huge advantage.

I know there are a lot of people who share this opinion, but speaking as ex-military, I think it's quite disingenuous and dangerous. Real life isn't some old-fashioned Western film where draw speed matters. If an adversary is malicious, carrying a round in the chamber, and decides to pull on you, he has the element of surprise. There is no real-world situation where you are really just that much better at drawing and firing accurately that you will out-draw an adversary who drew on you first, with the possible exception of Special Forces / Navy SEAL types who drill it ad-nauseum and had 99th-percentile reaction speed to begin with. But thinking that ordinary people can do it is sheer hubris. Thinking you can do it from concealed carry is utterly laughable.

In a real world firefight you're either close enough where martial arts is relevant or you're not. If martial arts are relevant, then the guns are irrelevant. If you're further away, what matters is whether you can get behind cover, which will give you time to unholster your weapon, disengage the safety, and chamber a round.

You don't decide to carry a gun in public because you think it will save you if someone walks up to you from behind and decides to shoot you in the back. You do it for the times when gunfights are not resolved with the first shot. Responsible citizens carry their guns in such a way that prioritizes the safety of those around them before their own personal safety.

> Glocks, two built-in safeties internally that would prevent misfires. The only way they would fire is if the trigger is pulled. Period.

Two built in safeties, plus a half-cocked striker instead of fully cocked like Sig. Another big difference is that one of the safeties is a physical thing sitting in between the striker and the primer. The equivalent on a sig 320 is a physical thing sitting in front of a lug attached to the striker, not actually in between the striker and the primer. That makes it a single point of failure, because if the lug shears off of the striker, the gun immediately discharges.

The big failure case for a Glock is something (drawstring, etc) getting into the holster and pulling the trigger. If you commit to never holstering without going really slow and shining a light down in there to verify nothing is getting at the trigger, it's safe. Which works if you just never take it out of the holster except at the range. Remove the holster and gun as a unit, stick holster and gun together in a safe, etc.

The absence of external manually activated safeties is really orthogonal to whether it’s striker fired or external hammer fired. There are countless guns that have external hammers with traditional double action or single action modes, but still lack an external safety. This is true of many many SIG and HK models.

I've had good luck with the P365s I've fired, though with Sig's apparent lack of QA, perhaps they're not consistent across production batches.

Re: your partner's hand and the blood blister, did you ever find something for that?

>> I have no idea why people buy pistols that aren’t Glocks.

Eh, that glock grip never felt right to me. The moment I picked up a PPQ it felt like someone had designed a grip specifically for my hand.

"I have no idea why people buy pistols that aren’t Glocks."

Jam halfway through a magazine? I'll stick with my Ruger from the 80s, thanks.

What about P226? I heard only raving reviews on that one.

I'm still very curious why the P320 beat out the venerable Glock 17 & 19 combo in the Army's recent selection. It would seem being able to change from duty to compact is more of a gimmick than practical. I'd wager most P320's will spend their service life in exactly one configuration.

Sig does have a way of making every pistol feel like it was custom molded to your hand - but Glocks "Just Work".

Off by one errors strike again, unless you EDC a machine pistol?

A Glock 18, huh? I’d fucking love to edc a Glock 18.

Its likely a misunderstanding and/or mischaracterization of "tolerance stacking."

A safe example is bike chain. If each one is 1 inch +- 0.01", if every single one is +0.01" then ten links will be long by a tenth of an inch. And might pass QC on the bike when pedaled by hand- but it'll fall off when somebodies full bodyweight and 100hrs of wear is out into it.

Do you have any evidence of this? The only thing I can find anywhere is a video of Ian timing a trans cosplayer who's doing a shooting match dressed as 2B from Neir: Automata (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhn18QhVzVM), and an Instagram post of him with a gay 2nd-amendment advocate (https://www.instagram.com/p/C2nh1HIy_uS/?hl=en).

"that every unintended discharge was due to user error" -- Sig is doing a fantastic job of making it clear that that's false (as you say).

The real statement is "every unintended discharge on a known-safe gun is due to user error." I would believe that all unintended discharges on, say, a Glock 17 are user error. I no longer can believe that of Sigs.

And it's like brakes on a car. If it fails for even one person one time and causes one accident, that's too much. The stakes are way too high when you're dealing with something that can take lives if it malfunctions.

If you have experience with firearms then you know that very few modern handguns have manual safeties.

I had the opposite experience with the P-10 F. Granted it's the only CZ pistol I own. But it's also the only modern pistol I own that was ready to go right out of the box without any kind of needed improvements or modifications.

Fwiw, I love my PPQ Q5 Match.

It really depends on the weapon / type.

I’d estimate I have shot over 100K rounds of 7.62 thanks to a good amount of time as an M60/M240 Gunner

You're absolutely correct. Part of why I have not been conceal carrying lately, is because I haven't prioritized consistent practice at the range in recent times. I want to ensure I'm proficient if I'm going to carry.

I should have clocked tens of thousands of rounds by now, at least one order of magnitude larger. Especially since micro-pistols like the P365 need the user to be more consistent with training, given that it's more difficult to be accurate with than with a full size gun. But life happens and I need to readjust my priorities before I get back to consistently visiting the range again.

For additional perspective, you can easily blow through 200+ rounds in one sitting - often under an hour, depending on what kind of drills you are doing. Many of the courses I've taken require a minimum of 300 rounds.

This is part of why "gun people" roll their eyes when the news talks about someone "hoarding thousands of rounds" - it's no where near as much as you might think, and people like to buy ammo when it's on sale (ammo's expensive!).

With SIG USA specifically there's a long track record of making firearms that can only be described as problematic. For example, their attempt to adapt SG 55x to the American market - all versions had some issues, but especially so the ones chambered in 7.62x39.

The unusual thing here is that this is a problem in a product that managed to pass US DoD acceptance testing. But the drop safety issue was already known at the time, so one has to wonder just how much in soft bribes SIG had to spend to get it adopted regardless.

Not sure that's the best example, since Toyota did have the unintended acceleration issue, though I still don't get whether the consensus among smart people was that it was purely user error.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic...

I mean, the new Toyota Tundra seems to have lots of problems with its V8, and I'm not sure people call that _crazy_.

Ford made the Pinto. The Volt or Bolt from GM had battery fires. I believe Tesla has had multiple safety and quality issues come up.

The fact that it's smaller changes two important factors for trigger systems - mass and geometry. Geometric differences for things like sear engagement or even travel of the striker before encountering the block can change how it functions. Mass is another critical element when it comes to dropping it and how the parts could move to release the striker, etc. These are the types of changes they tried to implement in the FCU update for the P320. The P365 is a completely different design for the FCU anyways. For all we know the fatal difference could be that the stamped housing for the P320 FCU flexes in a certain way to trigger the disconnect while the P365 is machined and doesn't flex as much or in the same way. Whether or not something like that would scale without affecting the desired weight or dimensions, I dont know. It certainly would affect price for larger stainless billet and more machining.

When you draw from concealment, an experienced shooter needs only get their grip and an eye picture -- point gun at target and fire. You only need to train muscle memory to get into a firing position, which is also what you are regularly training every time you live fire or dry fire.

If you don't have a round chambered, you need to draw, rack and release the slide, hope a round is properly chambered (in a panicked situation you might not rack the slide properly), then get into a firing position. This is a much more complex movement and evaluation of state. You are pulling the gun up, manipulating it with two hands, then moving it forward and finding your grip. In an emergency, that time loss and complexity of motion is considerably more difficult to train.

Even experienced shooters will draw from a holster and immediately present their gun and try to fire, and then realize they don't have a round chambered, have to bring the gun back to rack the slide, and then present the gun again.

You conceal carry because you want to be prepared at an emergency to deal with an imminent threat. Adding complex manipulations to that erodes your ability to do that, and any modern pistol should not fire unless you pull the trigger. They should be safe from drops, shakes, or manipulations.

If your threat isn't "I need to have a firearm ready asap", then you should consider not conceal carrying, in which case you may want your pistol unloaded or unchambered.

First, in most states it is not legal to point a weapon at someone unless you are in a situation where you're legally allowed to pull the trigger. That is, you are legitimately in fear for your life. In that situation you will likely have very little time to act in self defense.

Second, racking a slide is an action that requires fine motor control. Under the pressure and adrenaline dump that accompanies a life-or-death situation, fine motor control goes to crap. If you are fumbling with your pistol, it's useless.

Third, if you don't feel comfortable with your ability to safely handle a loaded gun, you probably shouldn't be carrying at all.

Because if you're going to carry, you should choose something that's safe to carry with a round chambered (i.e. not a Sig P320). There are countless videos showing real-world examples of defensive handgun use. One common thread is that there's virtually no time between when you realize you're going to need your sidearm and when you need it. The extra second it takes to rack the slide and chamber a round can be the difference between surviving the encounter and not.

I don’t conceal carry but it’s commonly known that you don’t draw your weapon unless you’re shooting to kill. In those situations, if there was time to chamber a round then there was time to escape. If you draw your weapon as a warning or, worse, fire warning shots you’ll be arrested for brandishing at least.

There's been debate over this for decades that has run its course.

The consensus is carry chambered or don't carry.

There is overwhelming consensus that you should carry with a round in the chamber. Most gun fights happen close and fast.

Not OP, but having a round chambered can be advantageous in a self-defense scenario, where every second counts. Having to think to rack the slide before firing could be enough for your opponent to get to you first.

I recently got into handguns and training.

I recommend everyone who has access to it go into training where you take a real handgun that's been modified to shoot laser and has CO2 recoil. The setup is that you have a screen (perhaps all around you), playing out a scenario. You're in a convenience store, and something may happen that requires you to defend yourself.

Even with a fair amount of training, the adrenalin surge is significant, and the time you have to respond is very limited. Doing this eliminated any illusions I had regarding guns and safety. There's little time to rack the gun to put a round in the chamber. And if you haven't done it, it's not easy to rack a gun (you need the right grip, angle, etc). And racking can fail. Even I, with very limited experience, have experienced multiple failures while racking.

People mentioned videos where people practice doing all this, and time themselves. I saw a video where someone 3 yards away draws a machete and runs at the other person. The time he has to draw and defend is just not enough at 3 yards. One needs to actively dodge the machete while drawing. Adding the complexity of racking is almost a guaranteed failure. The person drawing was very experienced (and a handgun trainer), knew the attack was going to come, and still had a low success rate.

Other things I've had to unlearn:

"Why didn't they just shoot at the legs?" At short notice, in an emergency scenario, aim is very poor. People train for these situations to get a reasonable likelihood of hitting a person without needing to spend time aiming. And the primary way to do it is to aim at the body - not arms/head/legs.

"Why did they have to shoot the person 3 times?" See above. Aim is hard, and there's a good chance of missing. When your life is on the line, you are not going to shoot once and check if it hit. You'll shoot 3 rounds quickly. When I did the simulator, I often shot 4-6 rounds without even realizing it (and was told by the instructor to keep it down).

This may be hard for some to believe/digest. As I said, I didn't believe it until I was put in those (simulated) situations.

Another thing I thought was crazy: People sleeping with a loaded gun by their bed. A guy did a video where an intruder was in the house and running towards their room. They timed different scenarios (unloaded with magazine on the side, different gun safes, etc). He succeeded only with one particular gun safe, and only with the gun fully loaded.

If I ever keep a gun at home, it will not be for "defend against an intruder in the middle of the night". It's just too risky to keep a loaded gun next to your bed. But if you have good reason to believe someone is after you, this is the only way to go.

Having said all that, if I carried a gun, I'd likely not have a round in the chamber. But that's really me saying I'm not going to carry a gun for safety purposes.

Military personnel generally can’t carry at all on post/base without a specific need. Nor keep private firearms at home, if on base/post housing.

This policy should tell you something about the actual cost/benefit of private arms as far as overall safety goes. Cuts through the noise and hypotheticals rather nicely.

They weren't concealed carrying.

These are Security Forces personnel guarding strategic nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. To illustrate the priority of their mission, Global Strike Command ordered that the troops normally carrying pistols be issued assault rifles in their stead.

I should have been more clear: if you're going to carry a firearm on your person, regardless of concealed or open, it should always have a round in the chamber.

Military police need them to prevent people from entering the base.

It's not an either/or situation. I'm sure they would have BOTH pistols and rifles.

A rifle and a pistol serve different purposes. This would likely have both.

Then gen2 glock is old enough to be considered one the original striker fired pistols. The parent is right. There's no reason to be making these kinds of mistakes these days. They industry has been churning out millions of safe striker fire personal carry firearms for decades now.

> the military is full of idiots (aka teenage boys)

The Air Force is not. (The average Air Force servicemember is older, better educated, better paid and subject to more demands than the average servicemember in the other branches.)

Yeah agreed. If people taught this than thigh holsters would be out (muzzle direction when sitting down), so would shoulder holsters. Pretty reasonable to expect a gun to not go off randomly, especially when reliable drop safety mechanisms have been around for a long time.

In general the safety rules I was taught were defense in depth -- multiple failures need to happen before someone can get hurt. So, even when you have a holstered firearm, pointing the muzzle away from people is preferable because then if it somehow does fail at least it's less likely to shoot someone.

Obviously that's not always practical, but if you are placing a chambered firearm down on a desk, you might as well try to point it in the direction of least harm, it basically costs zero to do.

There is a good chance there is security video coverage. Sig is cooked along with whoever their fanboys are in senior command. Hopefully that means the P226 Legion comes down in price :D

I think there is a lot of coverage but this is where I heard the details: https://youtu.be/ssNFf_bMjf8?si=47rN4X7WArPbNckZ

Better to be pointing it away from you when it goes off than having it pointed at you.