The p320 has been, as best I can tell, a complete and utter travesty that never should have seen widespread adoption in the first place
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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It's very strange to me that the apparent reason for the pistols going off is in the unique fire control design (combined with bad execution or QC), which is only designed the way it is to give a very slightly improved trigger pull compared to other SAOs. The military has a tradition of not really caring about trigger pull quality for general issue arms, but suddenly for a new pistol this design was selected.
I don't recall what the desire for a striker fired pistol actually was, but if I'm not mistaken it originally wasn't a striker fired design, and they modified it to be one. My understanding is that it was already a pretty crap handgun, that retrofitting to work a different way made worse
It might have even been the idea that striker fired handguns can be safer? I don't recall. It obviously hasn't worked out for them though 😅
Edit: just read more carefully- yeah I don't know why the fire controll design was chosen. I'm not very knowledgeable on the fire control aspects specifically
Its kind of a dumpster fire all around honestly 😅
Common striker pistols are liked for the consistency of their triggers and the easy manual of arms. Beretta M9s are perfectly safe, but their double action first trigger pulls are tremendously heavy. Additionally the all metal framed M9s while durable are very large and heavy for what they do and they lack some more amenities like out of the box optics compatibility. Replacing them made sense, and replacing them with a polymer striker handgun which is lighter, easier to train, and has modern features made sense. Choosing the Sig over the other designs didn't make sense.
Striker pistols really aren't any more or less inherently safe than other designs. The tradeoff for consistency with most striker pistols is that the triggers tend to be somewhat "mushy" with part of the trigger pull always tensioning the spring for the striker before releasing. The designs just can't hit the lightness of single action pulls. It's a downside, but a minor one especially for a combat pistol.
The Sig design "solved" this problem by making a striker design where the spring is always fully tensioned, which cuts down on what the trigger pull is doing. I think the best theory on the problems revolve around that. In this design rather than the trigger pull first tensioning and then releasing the spring, all it does is release it. This means if the internal parts holding the spring back slip out of position (say due to bad production quality) the spring releases just as if the trigger had been pulled and fired a round. Apparently even the manual safety isn't preventing this because all the safety is doing is preventing the trigger from moving but it isn't actually blocking the striker internally.
90% of security officers on US bases could just "Israeli carry" (Hammer down on an empty chamber. Or on a striker-fired handgun basically just insert the mag.) They'd have to adjust training to "draw+rack" but again, for Air Force MPs that is probably fine in most cases.
Either that or dust off a bunch of M9 handguns.
Israeli carry has, I've heard, been proposed within some commands. That would work as a bandaid solution, but it isn't fixing the core issue of something mechanically wrong with the guns which is not just a problem limited to Air Force MPs.
Sig has top to bottom dropped the ball and I agree the best solution would be reverting to M9s and/or choosing from a variety of other options, but unfortunately I don't think that will happen with as much sunk cost there has been into Sig contracts.